Experiment With Destiny

by Carr, Stephen

  “The citizens have left us much tonight, precious Rachel. Perhaps Ma can cook up some of her broth if these vegetables aren’t too rotten.” He pulled her tight to him and pressed his chapped lips to her louse-ridden hair. She was so like his daughter, or at least the memory of her, long ago…before he lost his job, his credit rating, then his home and his family. So long ago he could barely remember them…what they looked like. “We must go now. They will be here soon.”

  Releasing her spindly body, he turned his back on the market and began down the unlit alley, sure of his way from the countless times he’d made his way here and back again.

  “Where boy?” She grappled with the frayed arm of his coat, her strength surprising him. “Boy come too?”

  “Leave him.” Malcolm glanced over his shoulder. “He chooses to stay and play with their machines. He will follow soon enough, or he will learn the hard lesson.” Rachel’s eyes widened in dismay. She relinquished his coat sleeve and limped back toward the pale streetlights. “No Rachel! It’s not safe! We must go, before the dawn!” His half-growled, half-whispered protest did nothing to hinder her progress across the market place. “Aaargh!” Malcolm spat at the floor. He wanted to go after her, but he remembered the dogs…the sticks…the pain. He dismissed the memories with a gesture and continued on his way home toward the wastelands.

  He had almost reached the end of the alley when he sensed the distant vibrations of an engine. He froze. A sudden urge to flee filled his mind as cold fear seeped like ice along his spine. Even if he broke the paralysis of this terror he knew his aching body would not afford him the speed or the stamina to get very far. He could hear the noise clearly now, the hum of an approaching patrol car just a block or two away. Distantly, he could also hear Rachel’s voice…shrill and urgent, calling to the boy. She too had become aware of the danger.

  Malcolm searched ahead. He was no more than 50 yards from the edge of the wastelands. They would not pursue him there, through the scattered heaps or rubble and debris where their vehicle would not venture and they would risk injury on foot. He was suddenly torn between the choice of hurrying to his own safety or turning back. His love for the girl, his adopted daughter, was strong…but so too were the memories of their violence and the burning pain in his side. It was a dilemma he couldn’t solve.

  The bag containing his early morning spoils dropped to the floor with a splat, spilling the unwanted over-ripe fruit and vegetables over the filthy flagstones. His hands clawed the air hopelessly and he moaned aloud. Within seconds the engine noise was drowned by the wail of a siren, shattering the frosty silence of the pre-dawn. He saw the flashing blue of their light reflected along the damp walls of the alley. Then he heard their shouts and he shut his eyes, slipping within his own personal darkness…

  It was too late to go back to them. Rachel and the boy, curse him, were lost. If the police had dogs then he too could not hope to evade capture. It was just a matter of time before they sniffed him out. He heard a scream…then a solitary shot that echoed from wall to wall, lingering on the chill breath of the night. Malcolm dropped to the stony floor, his knees squelching with the vegetable matter. He began to writhe in terror and self-loathing.

  *

  Officer 620 stared at the appalling stain of blood and brain that smeared the roadside. A steaming trail of crimson trickled to a nearby drain and vanished beneath the street. He rolled the girl’s body without thought of dignity beneath his heavy boot, his expression darkening as he realised this fresh corpse was merely a child.

  Stepping carefully over the gathering pool of blood that framed her broken body, he returned to the patrol car. Lifting the microphone handset, his eyes scanned the dull red-bricked buildings that surrounded the square. Most were shops but, above one or two, curtains began to part in the windows as residents drawn from their sleep by the siren and gunshot peered down at this ugly scene.

  “Six-two-zero to control, over.” The receiver crackled.

  “Control to six-two-zero, receiving. Send traffic. Over.” He sent his report; suspected armed bank robbers sighted in the market area by some sleepless citizen had turned out to be vagrants, unarmed, scavenging for waste among the stalls. One dead, another – he described as ‘tramp boy’ – in custody. “Roger that,” confirmed control. “We’ll dispatch a meat wagon and get that mess cleared up for you before the citizens start waking up. Over.”

  “Probably a bit late for that, some of them are already awake! Over.”

  “Whatever…might do them some good to see real police work, eh? Stay safe Six-two-zero. Over and out.” The receiver went dead and he replaced the handset. Officer 620 glanced over at his partner, some distance away, who was in the process of cuffing the boy, still transfixed by the television.

  “You frisked him?” he called. His partner nodded. “Stolen credit card?” His partner shook his head. “Then how the bloody hell did he do that?” He gestured toward the public service broadcast screen. “And why? What possible interest can it be to the likes of him?” His partner shrugged, clicking the cuffs closed and pushing the boy toward the car.

  Officer 620 stepped toward the ‘tramp boy’ and studied him. He showed no apparent sign of fear, which was unusual. Perhaps he’d never encountered the force of law before, and didn’t know what happened to his kind when they trespassed into the real world. This would be a salutary survival lesson for him then.

  “How did you activate that thing…without a credit card?” The boy said nothing, wasn’t even looking at him. “More to the point, why would you activate it? Probably what woke up our concerned caller and gave the game away for you! Poor choice of viewing too, for someone your age!”

  They pushed him into the caged rear of the patrol car, the boy craning his neck to try and see the screen.

  “Good morning British Eurostate,” it continued minus its audience. “This is International News Broadcasting. It’s 5am. Coming up in just a few moments, Tuesday’s edition of Eurostate Today with your host Ted Hallder. But first, here are the headlines wherever you live…”

  *

  The cold sky was a blur of steel grey. It held no comfort for Malcolm. This morning, while the sky was still charcoal black, he’d lost his treasured companion, his adopted daughter. He was used to losing companions, it was an occupational hazard, if being a non citizen could be considered an occupation. Usually his friends and ‘family’ – for he considered Rachel to be both – passed away from illness, hypothermia or sometimes malnutrition, though that was rare. When they died, their empty bodies…their shells…were cremated and members of the wasteland community would gather in silence around the fire to reflect on times shared with the departed, good and bad. There would be no cremation for Rachel, no shared ceremony of sweet memories from her short, young life. Denied: her body was gone, taken away by the police and the flagstones scrubbed of every trace of her. Malcolm stared up at the tarnished heavens, his chilled hands wringing out what little warmth his blood could offer. The corners of his pale eyes offered up a silent prayer. Such a dreadful, pointless loss….why? God rest her soul. That boy…! But he told himself that questions would not bring her back and the bleak sky became even hazier behind his veil of tears.

  “What’s up wi’ Malcolm today?” Harry’s throaty voice asked. The old tramp stood in the doorway, eclipsing the sky, his withered frame hanging like bones within an over-large brown crombie. “He don’t seem his-self. ‘Ardly a bloody world all mornin’ to the world!” Harry thrust a hand-rolled cigarette fashioned from dog-end tobacco he’d painstakingly harvested from empty streets under cover of darkness between his toothless gums and drew breath for all he was worth. Its embers flared briefly between his grime-stained fingers. Ma ignored him and continued to work the pot on the open fire, her forehead sweating from its heat. Harry watched her labours and started to salivate as the bubbling liquid slowly thickened and the aroma of vegetables wafted across. He exhaled, his lungs whistling. “Seems like nobody round ‘ere wants to
spend the time of day talking to an old soldier today!” He shook his head, turned and stumbled away across the rubble surrounding the tumble-down warehouse. Ma glanced up to watch him go, then glanced round at Malcolm before returning her attention to the pot with a deep sigh.

  Harry’s arrival and departure had not gone unnoticed. Malcolm heard the tone of friendly concern in his voice but sorrow seemed to slow his senses and prevented him from making any meaningful response. Harry was a good sort. Originally from across the border, up north somewhere, his wry humour and tales of soldiering did much for community spirit. Malcolm knew that at night he could sometimes be heard crying alone in his ramshackle shed, either remembering the long past horrors of war or enduring the very present and increasing agony of arthritic pain. Yet, by daybreak, Harry was always smiling again as he meandered from ruin to ruin, sharing the warmth of his fellow waste-dwellers’ fires and his own unique brand of cheery conversation.

  “It’s the dark that brings the pain closer,” he’d told Malcolm once. “The dark more than the cold. It usually goes with the dawn frost, unless it’s a deep, deep frost.” The arthritis prevented Harry from taking part in many of the community’s activities: gathering kindling and firewood; forays into the edges of the other world for food; or carrying out makeshift repairs to the daily crumbling homes they fashioned from the derelict ruins. But Harry did his best, played his part, in other equally important ways. The community valued him and welcomed him and Malcolm knew he would be remembered with fondness when his turn came to pass from this world of pain.

  Malcolm wiped his eyes and looked beyond Ma out through the doorway of his home. Rachel was gone…and soon Harry would be gone too…and Ma, and him…and how many countless others? The other world had not known the passing of an orphaned girl so how would it learn of the passing of all who had been cast aside on this refuse tip of humanity? He wondered how his own passing would come about…murdered by the police, like Rachel, or choking cold and alone in the night, like Harry’s probable demise. And when he had gone, what stories would they tell of Malcolm as his bones sizzled in the fire and what trace of him would remain after the nomadic ones passed through and picked clean anything that remained of his few worldly possessions in his meagre abode?

  Cursing his self-pity he turned his thoughts to Rachel. Why did she have to die? So young and pretty, and so full of life. Although her twisted leg caused her to limp she seemed to skip through the days, and nights, without so much as a care. Her life had been cynically caged here in this miserable landscape almost from the beginning: her parent or perhaps both parents dumping her on the edge of the wasteland when she was just a few days old. Whether it was the imperfection of her leg, her testimony to some illicit affair, or perhaps she was the penultimate step toward a bankruptcy and the brink of non-citizenship…whatever the reason she’d been abandoned to a cruel fate out here while her folks continued their other world lives safe in the knowledge she was powerless to return and haunt them. Had they hoped she would perish in the cold of night? Or had they been confident the waste-dwellers would take her in, care for her and raise her as one of their own?

  Whatever their intent, she was gone now, and Malcolm felt the full weight of her loss. He heard the clatter of debris as a rat scuttled nearby. He imagined the vermin lived without such sorrows, their only instinct was to survive. His eyes clouded over again as the emptiness Rachel had left him clung to his weary soul. Unable to contain his grief any longer he began to sob aloud for the first time in so many years.

  Ma looked up from her steaming broth and studied him, then shed a silent tear…for Malcolm and for Rachel. Then, because she knew he would need food to sustain him when his grief was spent, she returned to her task. A sudden gust of wind howled across the broken landscape and rattled the empty window frames. She edged closer to her small cooking fire and noticed Malcolm tugging his coat tighter about him.

  Around them, the endless winter gripped the decaying monuments of industry, now standing ugly beneath a hidden, miserable sun. Abandoned by the citizens, these unwanted pockets of former industrial land on the peripheries of towns and cities became home to unwanted communities of people who could no longer sustain themselves. They used to have labels, like ‘economically inactive’ and NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) but now they were simply tagged ‘non citizens’ or waste-dwellers. As though invisible to the other world, the non-people existed, nothing more, where the captains of industry once thrived. By day, their makeshift hovels were only distinguishable from the ruins by the thin wisps of smoke from their campfires. At night, those fires twinkled like weak hope against the dark rubbled fields to keep the chill at bay. Most citizens ignored these fragile traces of life, a life they could never comprehend. The more adventurous gazed on from the comforting distance, when the light faded, perhaps even believing there was something slightly romantic about this way of life.

  “I’ll tell Harry there’s some food ready, shall I?” Malcolm broke the silence at last, the aroma of stewing vegetables stirring his hunger. He hadn’t eaten since before venturing into the market place on that ill-fated foray. Ma nodded, put down her spoon and stood creakily to fetch bowls from under the plastic sheeting in the adjoining room. Some of the wasteland homes were slightly better appointed. There was an abundance of unwanted furniture, old and battered and mostly needing repair, but still functional, scattered around the site. Long after the remnants of the former tenants had been harvested and recycled, the supply continued unabated as the citizens brought more…not out of charity but to avoid household bulky waste charges. One or two homes even had makeshift stoves – broken gas or electric cookers that were gutted and now used to burn whatever combustible materials could be scavenged. Ma always told him she’d like one of those, a ‘proper oven’ as she called them, but Malcolm always replied: “Travel light. We may have to move on in a hurry one day, when their bulldozers come.”

  He scorned the efforts of others who tried to decorate their squalid shelters with the abandoned trappings of the society that treated them with equal disdain. “Why pretend to live like them, with all their fanciful frippery?” he would say to Ma. “We’re nothing like them…not any more. It’s useless to pretend anything other.” She heard him struggle to his feet, pausing to catch his breath before shuffling off to fetch Harry.

  As he picked his way through the debris Malcolm remembered the boy. After crawling back along the alley that morning, his bones quaking in fear, he had watched the police throw Rachel’s bloodied and broken body into the skip lorry and it had made him retch. Then they returned to the boy, who had been cuffed and caged in the back of the patrol car, waiting silently for them. He’d watch one of the officers open the door and punch the boy in the face, heard him yelp like a puppy in pain. Then he’d heard them both laugh and watched them drive away before returning to salvage what he could of the pre-dawn pickings that sustained them.

  The boy was alive, but for how long?

  Malcolm had never liked him. Unlike Rachel, he had been born on the wastelands…to a nomad woman who’d drifted from community to community, offering her body in return for nourishment and warmth for the night. The boy’s father could have been anyone from the countless communities along the South and West of Wales. Nobody would ever know. She’d died some months ago, her body riddled with disease that Malcolm believed was the fruit of her immorality. Her son, nobody knew his name, survived alone for a week or two – waiting until the community slept before helping himself to any scraps of food and huddling beside their spent fires to squeeze out the last of the warmth. Ma had finally taken pity on the wretched urchin when she’d found him nestled sleepily between her fire and the inner wall of the warehouse early one morning. Despite Malcolm’s protests she’d invited him to stay, as company for Rachel she’d said. They boy had barely grunted an acknowledgement of Ma’s kindness. It wasn’t until days had passed that Malcolm realised he was mute.

  Although he’d not minded the ext
ra mouth to feed and body to keep warm, Malcolm did mind the way the boy had quickly made himself an ever-present companion to Rachel, and the way she’d taken so wholeheartedly to her constant shadow. Despite his lack of speech, and the fact he seemed to be perpetually wrapped up in a world of his own, they had somehow made a connection and she could be often heard giggling at him. Jealousy of their relationship, Malcolm knew, was no reason to dislike the boy. Indeed he’d told himself he should be glad that she finally had someone closer to her own age because it was uncertain how much longer he, himself, had to watch over her.

  But now Rachel was dead. And the boy, who had contributed to her demise, was still alive…somewhere…but in terrible danger.

  “Why should I care?” he muttered aloud to himself.

  He reached the outbuilding Harry called home. Malcolm reached up to clutch the rotten doorframe and pull himself over the missing step. He felt the sharp twinge in his side and flinched with the memory…the dogs, the beatings, the naked shame as they stripped and mocked him then hosed him with freezing cold water. “Run! You stinking bastard! Run!” they had shouted, “And don’t ever let us catch you again or we won’t be so lenient next time!” And he’d run for his life…

  “Harry!” he called, his old voice echoing. Those memories unsettled him. “Harry!”

  Rachel was dead but the boy was alive. What would he be going through in their hands, unable to even speak for himself, so vulnerable?

  Malcolm knew what the ‘Good Book’ would tell him. He knew what was expected of him. He knew what Rachel would have wanted him to do if she’d still been alive. He shuddered at the very thought…but he knew that, at the least, he would have to try…

  *

  XVII

  THEY ate in silence. Malcolm listened to the wind, his head turned away from Ma and Harry. Neither pressed him for conversation, sensing it was better to leave him to his thoughts. The stew tasted good, Harry said, but Malcolm hardly noticed its flavour as he absently spooned it between his chapped lips. He was thinking about the boy.