by Dave Wallis
Bangings and shouts and the sound of steps came from the rest of the castle. After a time he dozed. They were disturbed twice by gang members and their newly-met slave girls looking for places to lie, and arguments started and he could hear the angry voices in the distance long after the door was closed.
In the great Hall above, the last of the captured Kings were being brought in and made to help stack the booty. Ernie paced around checking and ordering.
The heady drug of power and command, spiced with fear and physical danger, still worked in him. He checked and re-checked matters which others could have done for him. He pondered the petitions of released slaves which were thrust into his hand and gave judgment with a great show of deliberation. Kings, against whom charges of torture had been laid, grovelled at his feet and whined out pledges of utter future devotion to his own Seely gang, if only he would save them. It didn’t even begin to go flat until five in the morning, after the nail-scissor chick. This was a slim, dark, gipsy-looking bitch of a cockney ex-slave girl who had a following of boys and girls speaking a private language and cultivating her own manner and vowel sounds. “Snip ’im, Meg, snip ’im,” the slaves shrieked whenever Ernie released unto them a fresh caught King. The King would go pale and sweat and gibber pleas for mercy and Ernie would put on his best distracted-leader’s air and motion them all away and turn sharp to something else which awaited his decision. In one slack moment he followed Meg and her crowd of stooges down from the hall to the smaller rooms below. She took one quick glance at him and paused and then shouted. “O.K. big chief, watch. Your turn next if you ever go the same way.” Even her own little court thought this chancy of her and gave Ernie apologetic looks seeking to express, “She’s like that. Quite a girl isn’t she? That’s why we followed her. No offence meant, of course.” Ernie stood and watched. They stripped the King and he whimpered and did no more than cup his hands over his cowed and shrinking genitals. They began to shout, “Get him, Meg. Get him, Meg,” over and over and to stamp in time like football fans. Meg motioned to two of her disciples and they held the victim firm. From her handbag she brought out an imitation crocodile-skin case made of plastic and, from among other glinting instruments, pulled out a pair of curved nail-scissors. The chanting rose in pitch and volume and the continuous high whimpering coming from the prisoner throbbed up to a screaming note in the background. Meg advanced with her eyes bright and a thin slither of saliva dribbling from her half-open mouth. Ernie wanted to shout, “No! Stop!” but then they might not think he was a real tough leader any more; so he stood and watched.
To use the scissors properly, surgically, would have meant handling the boy and this she would not do, for some reason, and so she went at the job stabbing, pecking and tearing at it like a starving vulture. The boy screamed and screamed and couldn’t faint. When she had done she slumped and lost her tenseness and handed the scissors over to a boy who stabbed the King behind the ear so that the blood spurted and jerked and then fell like the jet from a garden hose when the tap is wrenched shut. Ernie turned and started to walk away. He felt a bit sick but in his mind, as if he were already telling Kathy about it, or boasting among the boys, he was saying, “A bit rough but it was quite a sight, believe me.” There was a sound of steps behind him and Meg caught up with him. She clutched at his arm for a moment and he glanced down and shook her hand off. Her fore-arms were sheathed in a bright tacky envelope of drying blood.
“It’s only those who did it to us girls when we didn’t want it,” she said.
“Why tell me?” said Ernie. She shrugged. “Many more to come?” he asked. She shook her head. “Just do it, if you want,” he went on. “Don’t bring them to me like I was a judge or a headmaster or a jury or a probation officer or something.”
“O.K.,” said Meg, “I won’t.” She looked at him and raised a hand to her hair and started to settle it. Her sticky wrist was in front of his face and he turned his head. Suddenly aware she flinched and ran off.
Ernie climbed up the stairs back to the bustle of the stores-sorting, the press of petitioning ex-slaves and captured Kings. The Seely boys kept coming up and asking him where to put stuff, whether or not they should go after the remaining groups of scattered Kings in the town. Charlie came limping in with not one but three new girls fussing over him and trying to persuade him to let them dress his bruises with witch-hazel.
Kathy pushed through the crowd and came up to Ernie.
“What’s wrong,” she said and he told her about Meg’s little revenges.
“It turned me up a bit,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty but nothing like this.”
“Of course you know why that is?” said Kathy. She began to spout the half-baked Freud she had read years ago and how this was man’s great fear, and why.
“Shut up,” said Ernie. “It’s a long time since you came any of that sixth-form stuff.”
“Only trying to help,” she said, a little hurt. He made a vague apologetic gesture, not quite a caress. “There’s something wrong with that girl,” she went on thoughtfully. “Don’t have her in the gang, Ernie.”
“Hell, no,” he grunted. “She scares me stiff.”
Slowly the bustle subsided and the warriors went to rest. There were arguments and squabbles over the pairings and to escape the row and think he left Kathy and went out of an ancient doorway on to the broad terrace overlooking the Great Park, and leaned on the battlements.
Far below, from somewhere to the east of the town, came the faint noise of firing as the last of the Kings tried to escape. Dawn was just breaking. A low mist pearled the ground and the grass grinned through it in a cold sea-cave-like translucency. Seen from this height the tops of the trees billowed and tufted out like bunches of ostrich feathers or pond weeds.
Behind him two of the storing party, commanded by a boy who was trying to imitate Charlie’s walk and manner were chatting to some newly released slaves and, when they saw him, they made a great business of taking inventory so that he would hear and know that they were about their business efficiently.
Robert came up with the girl he said had helped them by putting out the flag. “Ernie,” said Robert, “Can’t you do something to stop people wandering round the castle all night, now we’ve taken it? We can’t get any sleep. Everything’s in a mmmmmmmme, in a jumble. If there’s any Kings still about in a proper gang they could take the lot back again and do us all. This is Julia,” he added, “by the way. I never had time to tell you her name before.”
Ernie looked at the girl and thought, “Blimey, a tart, doesn’t he know?” She as good as winked at him; but he just nodded to Robert. It might be her way of looking at any boy. Besides, what can you say to a bloke like that, anyway?
Three gang members came up to him one after the other and said, “Come and see what we’ve found, Ernie! Enough food for the rest of our natural . . . a deep-freeze working off batteries . . . stacks of discs and battery-operated record players . . . food, you never saw so much. . . .” Each then led the conversation round to an account of the battle and worked in a reference to his own quick-wittedness, . . . “dodgy at one point, I can tell you, Ernie. Still we’ve got the lot now. That was a real touch of the old genius, of yours coming down here . . . didn’t they squeal when their bikes went up?”
Kathy joined him and stood quiet by his side. He spoke without looking at her, “Funny the trees look, don’t they?”
“What’s funny about them?”
“I mean why should they grow up in shapes like that? Why not square or round? Why not in lumps like sponges or, or, well, any other shape?” She didn’t answer. Four members of a returning patrol waded under the walls with the mist swirling round their waists so that they seemed to glide along unaided by the concealed human prongs. “Why didn’t we have wheels instead of legs,” asked Ernie, “and just roll along on them?”
“Wouldn’t suit the boys, would it?” said Kathy, but he didn’t laugh. He seemed to need cheering up. “Well, you did it,
Ernie. You’ve got your revenge and got the gang everything they asked for,” she said.
Ernie said, “Tell Charlie to see the stuff’s all stowed away. Find out the best of the trucks of the Kings, load up all the food and clobber we can carry and get away.”
“Get away? Away from whom? There’s nobody going to attack us now is there?”
“No.”
“Then why do we have to go? There’s lovely rooms here and proper beds and bathrooms, not like that old cinema. Why do you want to go?”
“I don’t know why.”
Yet more gang members came up and hovered as if not wanting to disturb them. The new court had no protocol for audiences.
“Please Ernie, there’s such an argument going on in the bedrooms. Now that the Seely St. boys have taken up with some of these slave-girls their own girls are complaining because they’ve not only lost their boys but lost a decent place to kip as well. Honestly there’ll be a fight soon if you don’t come and settle it. . . .”
The other broke in, “While we’re here, Ernie, there’s this business of kitchen duties, I mean the Kings had the slaves do it all, but now, well, do the old rotas hold good or what? There’s all these extra people to cook breakfast for. It would have been my turn in the normal way but . . .”
“Then it’s still your turn, chum,” said Ernie and a new, bleak note of weariness in his voice made Kathy look at him. “Get as many as you like to help you, just for today. Say I said so.”
“Thanks Ernie.”
“Kathy’ll come and sort out the girls. There’s plenty of beds somewhere. If not; it’s quite safe to move into the town anywhere now, tell them.”
“Thanks Ernie.” They left.
“You’re tired, Ernie,” said Kathy, “come to bed.”
“No, I don’t feel like sleep, got past it.”
“You would do straight afterwards.”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t want it.”
“I’d make you want it.”
“No.”
“What’s the matter Ernie?”
“I told you I don’t know. Leave me alone.”
“Do you still think we’ve all got to go from here?”
“Yes.”
“I thought taking this place was the very thing you wanted?”
“So did I.”
“Where’ll we go if we do leave here?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the matter? Tell me.”
“I told you I don’t know. Just leave me alone.”
“All right, then,” playing her last card, “I’ll go and find Charlie, for some company.”
“He’ll be with some slave-girl.”
“They’re not slaves any more.”
“Just go and find him, and leave me alone.”
“All right, then. Come to bed soon.”
“Maybe.”
She turned and walked away. At the doorway she looked back. He was leaning on the battlements, gazing out over the empty parkland with his shoulders hunched like a gargoyle. Ernie, the king of the castle.
BOOK THREE: Northern Spring
10
Typhoid spread from the parched lavatories and stale water tanks. It was in the cities that people were found ignorant and foolish enough to eat five-day-opened tinned meat. Medical students who had set up barter clinics had had their supplies of anti-biotics raided and their drugs consumed for kicks, so that even the mildest of the various influenza viruses advanced unopposed. Thus, as history students were later to surmise, there was not one cause of the plague, nor even one plague, but many. It became dangerous and then impossible to remain in the vast decaying, collapsing honey-combs of the cities.
The flatting and combing parties of the Seely St. gang were forced farther and farther in their trading and raiding sorties. Some did not return at all. The crowds of children who swarmed around each gang died moaning and unattended, or else formed small colonies of their own in scattered houses where they had once buried secret hoards of tinned pineapple and pilchards. Of all the thousands of babies born few survived.
The old home cinema became cold and silent and empty. The supplies from Windsor were wastrelled away and in one week five members of the original gang died of the plague. It was time to leave.
A perilous trade route, subject to bandit raids and the swoops of high-powered motor-cycle highwaymen, stretched north and at great new fairgrounds and markets near Baldock and Biggleswade the Southern and London gangs met and traded, in uneasy truce and armed neutrality with the tough tribes who had swung down from the empty cities of the Black Country and the bleak moorlands, and, even, from the Border lands and Scotland. These brought with them stinking, home-cured, smoke-smelling sheepskins, and hand-filed spares for the bikes of the lazy southerners.
On a rainy October afternoon Ernie called a council meeting in the Manager’s Office.
Kathy listed the supplies. There were enough for ten days for the few survivors. There were now only about eight boys and girls of the original tribe, apart from the elders, Ernie and Kathy, Charlie and Estelle, and Robert with his polyandrous Julia. The days of the big mobs were passing in any case. They needed large and certain sources of supply and too elaborate an organisation and defence. The pressure was all towards smaller, freer-ranging wolf-packs, travelling lightly.
“What it amounts to,” said Ernie, “is that we’ll starve or get the plague if we stop in London much longer. We might as well take what we’ve got and move up nearer the northern markets. We have to trade with them in any case.”
“What happens when we’ve got nothing left to trade?” asked Charlie.
“Surely we can live, if all those swede-bashers and hayseeds manage to,” said Ernie. And so they set out with no real plan or purpose, but just a vague feeling that this would be a bigger and longer expedition than all the others.
Two battered vans heavily loaded lurched out of the yard. Ernie and Kathy sat in one with Estelle in the back and Julia and Robert in the other. Charlie led the outriders with a faint trace of the old bravado, but no banners or tiger flags flew and the machines, badly needing new plugs and a decoke, spluttered and smoked. The greedy fashion of snatching at new bikes and trucks and running them into the ground had swelled through two whole summers. Now it was autumn again and the grasshoppers rattled along dripping rust-flakes. The old ant virtues of maintenance had been lost.
“I suppose this is the last time we shall see it all,” said Kathy.
“See what?” grunted Ernie. “Nothing left to see, now.” Estelle was crouching on a packing case behind them, leaning on the back of their seat. “Doesn’t it seem ages since we were all kids round here and the oldies were still running everything?” she said. “That’s where I used to live. . . .”
“What about it?” said Ernie.
“Ernie!” snapped Kathy.
“Well, she gets on my nerves, all that chattering.”
“Who’s she, the cat’s mother?” asked Estelle.
“You’re not the only one with nerves, Ernie,” said Kathy.
Robert brought the second van alongside and Julia waved to them from the window. Estelle leaned forward and waved back. Ernie just concentrated moodily on his driving and Kathy tried to nod to Robert Sendell as if he were on his own.
“Poor Robert,” she said.
“Well,” said Estelle, “at least he’s got a girl now. It must be a relief to you not having him trailing around after you all the time.”
Ernie gave a hard chuckle.
“Ernie,” snapped Kathy again.
“Of course,” Estelle went on. “She’s a real menace. Anything in trousers. . . .”
“That’s what I meant,” said Kathy.
“He knows it’s going on, then?”
“He must do. She doesn’t pretend to hide it from him. He’s got it really badly though. He just moons around waiting for her to finish with whatever boy it is. Live and let live is the rule since the oldies did it but sh
e shouldn’t’ve let him think she’d be his steady in the first place.”
“Did you see the way she had her hair this morning? Just scraped it back and put a rubber band round it in a pony tail – sort of thing went out years before the Crisis even. . . .”
“In too much of a hurry to get going and pick up boys at the fair, I suppose. . . .”
They continued their pecking until Ernie suddenly said, “Shut up you pair of bitches! Julia’s all right.”
After a short silence Kathy said, “I knew all the men are for her, natch, but I thought you didn’t like easy touches.”
“What’s that got to do with it? You two are a pair of virgins, I suppose.”
“Ernie!”
“Stop saying ‘Ernie’ like that. You know what you sound like? You sound like we were a pair of married oldies in the old days, out supposed to be enjoying ourselves some Sunday in the car and you nagging all the time.”
There was a further very short silence and then Kathy said, “I know,” and started to cry.
“Oh, hell!” said Ernie and gripped the steering wheel and banged his foot down. Kathy turned and buried her face in the back of the seat. Estelle put an arm round her shoulders, caught Ernie’s eye in the mirror and glared at him reproachfully.
“I suppose you’ve been with her, too,” sobbed Kathy.
“Oh yes, every night,” said Ernie bitterly.
After a time Estelle said, “Come round the stalls with me, Kath, when we get there. I want to look for some decent woollies now the weather’s getting colder again.”
They started to chatter about fashions and shortages and food and clothes until they reached the outskirts of the market.
Near the village of Stafold a field and a row of cottages formed the centre of the trading area. They stopped and climbed down and the outriders wheeled round, with Charlie at their head, and drew up with a feeble and spluttering trace of the old style. One or two traders turned their heads for a moment. The air was full of the smell of wood smoke from the camp fires and of the sad sharp dampness of early autumn. Three short, dark young graziers from the dales, who knew Ernie by sight, strolled by herding a cow and five ragged, mud-caked sheep. They nodded to him and eyed the girls up and down in a hot but strangely indifferent fashion, from under long, uncut black hair and tilted caps.
