by Alex Marwood
‘I have some news, Father,’ she says as she refills. There is still plenty more in the bottle; it was almost full when she got here. I’ll bring it over to the table, she thinks. Leave it there, to save the trips.
He’s drifting, quite happy now – his pain, if not forgotten, irrelevant. Vicodin makes him genial. He’s taken enough now that he’s putty in her hands. She pops another, hands it to him as she resumes her seat on the rug.
‘What news?’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she says. ‘I have your baby growing inside me.’
She gives him his drink. Lucien sucks on the straw and smiles at her with his empty blue eyes. ‘It will be the One,’ he says.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘What a blessing you’ve given me.’
‘He won’t like it, of course,’ he says, though he doesn’t seem particularly bothered.
‘I know,’ she says, and puts another Vicodin into his hand.
Among the Dead
December 2016
46 | Romy
It’s a hundred and ninety miles from Finbrough to Southwold, and it takes three hours to get there. As the crow flies, it’s shorter, but of course there is the whole of London between the two. Six hundred and eleven square miles of it, eight million people crammed in like ants in a formicarium. That’s thirteen thousand people to the square mile. One of the problems at Plas Golau, according to what I’ve read, was overcrowding, and there were a hundred and sixty of us to a farm of roughly a square mile. If overcrowding caused our meltdown, then London must be an open powder keg waiting for a spark.
One day, before I leave, I shall go into London and look. But not now, not now. Now, I have to go and kill my oldest living friend.
* * *
* * *
Ellie Dracoulis. It sounds like a vampire, sounds dark and brooding and Transylvanian. Nothing blonde in that name. Where does it come from, I wonder? Has she married? Or was that her mother’s birth name, as Maxwell was mine? You can find anything on the internet. Even, it seems, a face from years ago, matured and living incognito.
I must try to think of her as a stranger. As someone I didn’t break bread with every day of my childhood, share beds with, share laughter. It will make it easier. I hope she understands.
The road gets gradually narrower, slower, bleaker, great beds of reeds springing up from pools of ominous green water. Single lonely trees against the sky, an eerie sense that the sea is right behind each hedge.
I don’t see the sea until I am nearly upon it. And then houses rear up from the flatlands and suddenly, there it is. The North Sea, my first sight of it. Different from the sea I know. This sea is stern and black and slow-moving. When I open my window to hear and breathe it, instead of the whoosh of the sea at Weston I hear the gelid suck that drowned a thousand longships.
It’s a beautiful town, a glorious town. A good place to hide, to recover. After the usual approach through a hinterland of battered nonentity, I reach a place where the roads narrow and wind, and flat-fronted cottages open straight onto pavements. A lovely fishing village, protected by its isolation. On the front, genteel villas gaze out at stormy water, little beach huts painted in primary colours huddle below a bank of green, a pier strides boldly out across the waves. Wide golden sand that makes me long to strip my boots off. I park up on North Parade and watch the ocean as I drink my coffee and plan my next move. Christmas lights everywhere, cheerful in the winter gloom. I don’t suppose I shall ever see the festival itself.
Once you have someone’s name, you have almost everything. She’s got careless, has Eilidh. Now Uri has found her, I see Ellie Dracoulis everywhere. Bubble-headed Ellie, smiling her big smile from the Southwold Arts staff page, smiling her big smile from Facebook and countless photos by her tag-happy friends on there, on Instagram, on Twitter. Ellie at a barbecue, Ellie dressed as a squaw, Ellie hugging a big sandy dog, Ellie laughing, approaching the camera on a water slide with a screaming toddler in her lap. The toddler turns up in lots of pictures. She looks about two. Oh, God, Eilidh, I didn’t know you had a daughter. It all makes sense now. And I know, just from looking, that I would still like you.
Southwold Arts is based in a small office that used to be a shop, in one of those cute little cottage streets. The plate-glass window has the organisation’s name spelled out in childish cardboard cut-out letters glued to its inside. On the sill, on a stand, a huge oil landscape of a ruined boat and a water tower. Three desks, modern, curvaceous, facing each other, and Eilidh sitting at one, side-on to the window, on the telephone, blissfully unaware of me. I only pause for a moment, to look, to be sure it’s really her, and then I walk on down to East Street and back to the front.
My knife is in my jacket pocket. My hoodie’s so snug these days it stands out unmistakeably in the front pocket.
* * *
* * *
I find a chintzy little café almost directly across the road and buy a scone and a cup of tea, though God knows I don’t want them. And I sit in the window – the place almost empty, two old ladies discussing some man’s prostate troubles and the woman behind the counter already beginning to wrap up the cakes in clingfilm – and watch.
The office looks warm, welcoming. I hope that she’s had a good time here. That life among the Dead has been good to her. Her remaining colleague, late thirties, horsey, is facing me, and they’re having an animated conversation, heads bobbing, hands waving and the occasional pause while she stops to laugh. Ellie Dracoulis. Popular. A much-loved colleague. Beloved mother of Suki, daughter of the late Marnie. You won’t die forgotten, at least. Three hundred and seven friends on your Facebook page, and, from the way you all talk, I bet you know a good quarter of those in real life.
I don’t remember her being particularly artistic. She was all thumbs. But maybe you don’t need to be artistic to be a junior co-ordinator. I have no idea what that is.
I crumble my scone between finger and thumb, take a taste. It’s floury and solid, and I’m glad I’m not going to be eating much.
The colleague leaves as Eilidh gets to her feet and starts packing up her desk. She collects a handful of mugs, carries them through a door at the back of the room. She’s gone for a few minutes, long enough that I begin to wonder if there’s a back way out, and then she emerges, wearing a sweet black velvet frock coat that comes all the way to her knees and pulling a woollen shawl over her shoulders. She reaches back through the door and turns the light off behind her, then she comes to the front door and turns the lights off in the office. I haul myself to my feet – and doing that takes some time nowadays – wave a five-pound note at the woman behind the counter to show her I’m leaving it, and come out to follow her.
She doesn’t look around. Why would you? It’s four o’clock on a drizzly evening in Southwold. It’s not a place where stag parties roam, like Weston, or where someone could throw you down and snatch your bag, like London. It’s just ... coming home from work in a small North Sea town, thinking of the central heating and picking up the kid. She turns down towards the sea, pulls her shawl up against the wind and I do the same with mine. It’s bitter, out here in the sea wind. There’s no one to be seen, no lights on the pier, curtains drawn across windows.
I call her name. Her name from home, the one I know her by. It will be the last time I ever speak it, I guess. I have to call it twice, for the wind carries it away the first time.
Eilidh turns with her big wide smile to see who wants her. And she sees me and the smile drops away. ‘Oh, Romy,’ she says.
I look at her and bury my hands in my pockets.
‘I knew one of you would find me, one day,’ she says. ‘I just wish it wasn’t you.’ And she starts to cry.
47 | Romy
She didn’t fight. Didn’t argue. In the end, we are what we are, and Eilidh, despite the clothes and the make-up and the new life, was still a child of the Ark. The obedience was hard-wired
within her, whatever the veneer. As it is in me. As it is in all of us.
* * *
* * *
A car swishes past in the lane where I’ve pulled up to rest and weep, and its headlights bring me back, set off a fit of coughing, for my throat is dry as sand. There’s no sign of the sky lightening, but I know from the feel of the air that dawn is near. You know these things, if you’ve lived in nature, as I have. I need to get on the road. He’ll be walking her to school at half-past eight, and I know that if I hesitate, if I don’t go through with it now, these memories of Eilidh will stay my arm and all will be lost.
My knife still has her blood on it.
* * *
* * *
By the time I get to Finbrough, my brain is fuzzed with weariness. I caught the rush hour halfway round the M25 and spent an hour crawling, stopping, crawling, stopping. Fell asleep during one of the longer waits and flew awake with a start to the blast of a queue of car horns behind me. You’re quiet inside me. Sleeping, I hope. If you’ve died while I’ve been travelling, it will all have been for nothing.
I find a space two roads over from the bridge, by a hedge of overgrown box. It’s eight o’clock and my heart is racing. I consider taking a beta blocker, but decide against, in the end. If I’m going to do this, I must face it with every cell in my body, or in time all this will become a dream, the sacrifice diluted, the value of the lives lost diminished. I must never forget the sacrifices that have been made for you, baby. For the world.
Oh, Eilidh, oh, Eden, I never knew I would be your avenging angel.
Before the End
June 2016
48 | Somer
She’s on privy duty when she sees Vita come home from one of her trips to the outside world. Somer wonders, sometimes, if she will ever see that world again. She’s been here so long that its speed and garish colours, its noises and its endless stimulation, seem more dream to her than real-life experience. When she came here, Vita’s hair was still blonde. Uri was a sulky young man who came on access visits from the army. And Lucien was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen; a sun-god of strength and vitality, an inspirer, a true Leader. She’d longed to be chosen by him. Had been beside herself with joy when she’d found she was carrying his child.
He’s a shadow of himself now, she thinks. How funny. We’re really only keeping his legend going through the force of our will.
Somer sees Romy, all by herself, walking briskly towards the orchard wall. She stops when she gets there, scans all around to see if she is being watched. Doesn’t even notice her mother in the shadow of the privy door. Somer is used to that now. She’s been invisible here for so long. Romy hops over the wall and vanishes across the road, into the woods. That girl’s up to something, thinks Somer. I wonder what. Then she looks away to fix the lid onto her barrel of shit and thinks no more about it.
* * *
* * *
She’s loading up her cart – Vita got them a cart recently so that they can carry three barrels at a time rather than labouring to get them one by one down the hill – when a flurry of movement catches her eye. Ursola running out of the courtyard gate. It piques her interest. Life is slower here. You rarely see anyone over the age of ten running. Their days are too long and their work too hard to waste energy that way.
Somer straightens up and watches her go. She’s heading for the Guard House. Very odd. Running may be an unusual occurrence, but she has never, ever seen someone run towards the Guard House.
A couple of minutes later, Ursola returns with Uri, both of them jogging as he buckles up his belt. Ursola looks almost panicked and Uri looks suddenly about twelve again, his natural disdain wiped away by a look of – something. She’s unsure what. Not fear, as such, but certainly some form of dread, of uncertainty. Then Vita comes through the gate to greet them and Somer sees that she is crying. Her hands fly up to cover her face when she sees Uri, and she comes to a halt on the drive in a pose of abandoned grief.
Oh, God, thinks Somer, something’s happened. Something terrible. Are we to see the End after all?
Even now, in his moment of crisis, there is no physical contact between them. Their relationship has always been cold. Uri was six when Lucien left his mother for Vita, or so the story goes, and he’s never really got over his resentment. They stand facing each other for a moment, then go back into the courtyard side by side, and disappear.
Somer finishes loading the handcart and starts to haul it carefully down the hill. It’s an improvement on how things were done before, but it’s a job that must be done with caution, for the path has never been paved and its earthen surface is riddled with tree roots.
She’s halfway down when she hears a walkie-talkie crackle into life. There must be a Guard on the other side of the wall, lurking the way they do, waiting to catch the unwary in dereliction of duty. ‘Dom to all Guards,’ it goes. ‘Whisky Tango Foxtrot repeat Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over?’
Somer gets chills. The Guards have a series of call signs on their radios. They probably think they’re secret, but they use them so carelessly, talk so thoughtlessly among themselves, that most of the compound knows what they are. Alpha 1-2 means that the End has started. Victor Bravo is a medical emergency. And Whisky Tango Foxtrot means ‘major emergency, all Guards to Guard House’.
She leaves her burden and hurries back up to the privies, where she can take a better look. All across the compound, khaki-clad figures hurry towards their goal.
Up at the house, the great bell in the tower on the roof begins to toll.
49 | Somer
Silence. Then silent tears. They stand with their heads bent and weep for their loss. And in among them, Vita. Still there, still with them, still mother to them all.
She moves between them like the spirit of their world. Vita who is, who always has been, their continuity and their kindness. Pale with grief, but still finding it within herself to smile. A face touched here, a palm pressed to the back of a hand, a pair of arms to wrap yourself in. She sees Somer, even Somer, and envelops her in her golden web of fellow feeling. Presses her forehead against Somer’s, holds it there, holds her hand. Moves on.
He loved you. He loved you all. Each one of you was special to him. He has left, but he is not gone. He will live on with all of us, in everything we do.
Somer is dazed. The beautiful day, the blue sky above, the people with whom she has shared her life for all these years, seem unreal to her, like ghosts or distant wood smoke. He never forgave me. I waited and waited, but forgiveness never came, and now he’s gone and I will live my life like this.
The Guards are gathered with them, Ilo among them, his face blank as though someone has erased the soul within. Eden weeps with her remaining siblings and never casts her a glance. Over by the gate she sees Romy, standing alone, dry-eyed like her brother.
* * *
* * *
The surprising sound of an engine beyond the wall. They turn to look, wonder who is disturbing their sorrow. Then they see that it is the compound car, Jacko at the wheel. He drives through them like a cop through a demo: slowly, slowly as they part, carefully, so as not to inflame. Vita glances, then glances away. Keeps her back turned as two Guards emerge from the kitchen door and begin to load it up. Three canvas bags on the back seat, a box in the front.
They know what it means. Now Lucien is no longer here, Vita’s days at Plas Golau are done.
They wait.
* * *
* * *
The bolts draw back on the Great House door and the people of the Ark look up as one. Faces animate, and she is surprised to read hope on many. They hope he’s going to come out now, she realises, and tell us it was a mistake. They hope he isn’t dead.
And then Uri comes from the shadows within and their shoulders slump and they exhale.
His Guards straighten up. Stand to attention, separate their legs and sta
nd at ease. Like soldiers. Like proper soldiers. Uri sweeps them with his eyes and what they see on his face is ... triumph.
Silence. They hold their collective breath. Vita turns round slowly to face him and her shoulders straighten. She holds her head high, like a queen.
‘You can go now,’ he tells her.
When she speaks, her voice is clear. ‘These aren’t your people, Uri,’ she says, ‘and this place isn’t for you to take.’
* * *
* * *
He is white with fury. And still no grief.
‘It’s mine! He wanted me to have it,’ he shouts. ‘He told me. It was always going to be me!’
Vita, now the moment is here, is as calm as he is enraged. ‘But Uri, he left it to me. I’m his wife. You have Cairngorm. That was what he wanted you to have. It’s all in the will, if you want to look.’
Lucien, keeping everybody happy, playing them all.
He is robbed of words. His jaw works, but no sound comes out. For a moment she thinks he’s going to call his Guards to action, that battle will break out here and now. Then he blinks. Grinds his teeth.
‘You are not his heir,’ he says. ‘You’re not the One. And you’re nothing without him.’
Vita tosses her beautiful silver hair. ‘Whatever,’ she replies.
The strain of self-control must be monumental, thinks Somer, as he marches down the steps, head held high, back rigid. He walks to the car and removes Vita’s bags from the back seat and hands than to the people nearby. Takes her box from the passenger seat and lays it gently on the steps, feigns respect for her hated possessions.
