One

by Conrad Williams

  5. THE SEA EAGLE

  Jane picked his way through the sludgy tan moss of the hillside, the rain like the heel of a hand pressing him towards the dead earth. Apart from the astonishing spectrum stuttering across the sky, the world had turned sepia. The meadows were scorched flatlands, the woods so many burnt matchsticks piled in occasional clumps. The exploded bodies of sheep lay in fields like fallen sunset clouds. It was hard going. The path had turned into a sluice; already there was evidence of minor mudslides where plates of the sodden, shocked ground had slipped free. An autumnal smell of decay and cold carbon hung in the air. It was deep in his clothes, his skin. He could smell it rising off his piss in the mornings. He wondered if his bones might smell of woodsmoke.

  At the top of the hill he unshouldered his rucksack and rested. He had secured the feather in a strap on the bag. It fluttered now like a reminder. He had thought for a long time about the feather, where it had come from, how it appeared to have been placed next to his things. But that could not be the case. It must have already been in the room, and his movement, or that of the wind, must have caused it to fall. Maybe it had been a decoration, an ornament, a memento collected and then forgotten by the room's previous incumbent.

  It was a large feather; Jane couldn't begin to guess what it had once belonged to. He had broken into a couple of the houses at the southern edge of the town and found a guidebook to British birds. He'd also liberated a pair of Nikon binoculars and an unopened bottle of Bladnochmalt whisky. He cracked the seal on that and took a brief swallow before putting the binoculars to his eyes and sweeping them slowly over the view.

  East, the sea, huge and black and torrid in the lenses, its surface a choppy coating of spume. The beach was choked with tens of thousands of washed-up fish. Here and there something more exotic: white-beaked dolphins, grey seals, a basking shark, a minke whale. Endless fluthers of jellyfish. He peered through the glasses at the land to the south-west, turning through 360 degrees until his attention was back on the water. Nothing but stubbled countryside and the boiling horizon.

  He took another belt of whisky and secured the bottle in the rucksack. He shouldered it, making sure that the straps were not twisted, and headed back down the hill.

  'Careful, Stanley,' he called out. 'Mind you don't slip.'

  He had climbed a hill with Cherry early on in their relationship. It wasn't lost on him that much of their time together since had felt like the same thing. They had taken a tent to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. They'd climbed Pen y Fan, a day's trek, and then camped in the great valley beneath it, cooking packet foods in water taken from the nearby lake and boiled, smacking their lips, making appreciative groans even though the rehydrated rice had been appalling. The silence as night fell had freaked them out. That and the depth to the sky, the assault of stars. Their chattiness was cut by the spectacle. They lay on their backs in the grass, awed as stars materialised in the dark spaces between the brighter bodies. There was no limit. There was a point when they both swore there was more light than night in the sky.

  They watched the scratches of light as meteors erased themselves on the skin of the Earth. They pointed out the uniform trajectories of satellites. Venus crept across their line of sight. Even though they were exhausted by their long walk, sleep had no chance of settling in them.

  'It's amazing,' Jane had said.

  Cherry's voice, when she replied, quavered, brimming with tears. 'I feel . . . small, and thrilled, and sad,' she said. 'I can't explain. I haven't the words.' He clasped her hand.

  'We're on the edge of a galaxy that's expanding,' he said. 'We're the shrapnel from a bomb blast.'

  'If we're on the edge, does that mean we're one of the oldest parts?'

  'That would make sense, wouldn't it?'

  'So the centre of the Milky Way, that's quite young?'

  'Well, relatively, I suppose.'

  'Should we take a physics degree now?'

  They did not make love that night, the first time in three intense weeks since they had started seeing each other regularly. Jane, whose appetite for her was great, did not notice.

  'Those meteors,' he said, as another chalked itself off, 'they're probably the size of golf balls. Maybe smaller.'

  'Richard balls?'

  'I said smaller, not bigger.'

  Once you had become accustomed to the dense scatter of stars, and fastened your eyes to one patch, it was striking to realise how many meteors there were.

  'It's beautiful,' Cherry said. 'But I wouldn't want to be out there.'

  'We are out there,' Jane replied.

  'You know what I mean.'

  'Yeah. It's a pretty rough place. You wouldn't last a second. Nothing to breathe. Sub-zero temperatures. Radiation. Super-accelerated debris would fly straight through you. Pressure.'

  'Perhaps only marriage comes close to rivalling it.'

  He laughed nervously at that. 'If anything larger than a golf ball came down on us . . . I mean, considerably larger than a golf ball, like the size of Iceland, say, we'd be in big trouble.' 'I've seen the films.'

  'You've seen the heroes save the day. What if one really hit? Came down tonight. If you survived the impact you'd be looking forward to a nuclear winter that lasted years. No sunlight. Death of vegetation. Food chain down. Everything dead.'

  'Are you always such a hot date?'

  Jane liked that about her, that ability to rescue them from a downturn in mood with a quip. It wasn't the only thing. Cherry was like no other woman he had met. She didn't have a ramrod-straight back and skin so glossy and flawless you could have played curling on it. Her hair wasn't advert soft, thick and tangle-free. She didn't have a hundred pairs of shoes or spend two hours in the bathroom getting ready for a pub lunch. She didn't consider a small green undressed side salad to be a substantial meal. He liked the way she moved during lovemaking, flipping him onto his back, climbing him, pressing fully against him, a steepening of herself to match the growth of her own pleasure.

  'What would you do?' she asked. 'If this was our last night? If a meteor were to hit, or the Earth split in two, or a star exploded and drenched us in fire?'

  'Burn my pants and take a shower.'

  'But seriously?'

  'If we survived? I'd shoot you. And then I'd shoot myself. There would be no way forward.'

  After that night things changed. There was a soberness. It wasn't as if they didn't have fun or failed to enjoy themselves, but later in their holiday, canoeing in the Bristol Channel or scrambling in Llantwit Major did not inspire the excitement it ought to have done. There seemed a check on their behaviour, as if screaming or laughing in the wake of what they had witnessed would somehow be disrespectful. The enormity of what lay beyond the Earth's meagre pull, the knowledge that they had been staring at stars long dead before the Earth had cooled, humbled them both. Jane wondered if that night had damned them in some way. Instead of opening themselves to the beauty of it, they had taken a left turn and talked about the blanket lifelessness in space and time, other than on this speck of blue-green dust.

  They returned home and two weeks later Cherry told him she was pregnant.

  The wind around him, harsh and frantic, as if trying to get inside him. The sea a black wall. He remembered a magazine he'd started collecting, years before – he must have been thirteen, into fighter jets and blood – about the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, and the British campaign to get them back. It was one of those magazines whose introductory price was remarkably low, but then reverted to a couple of pounds and went on interminably; he never followed the run through to the finish.

  The Marines and the Paras covered more than fifty miles of inhospitable land by foot in bad weather in three days, carrying full pack. 'Marching' didn't do it justice; 'yomping' was more like it.

  Treat this as an act of liberation, Jane told himself. This is not about you. The miles will go easier if you keep your mind on Stanley. You can tell him about yomping when you see him. You can te
ll him about Goose Green and the Paras, and his namesake port where the final battle took place. He'll love that.

  Stanley had begun to be fascinated by death. But he didn't see it as a permanent thing. Playing with his Star Wars characters, he would 'dead' somebody and after a while they would come back to life. But it was obviously in his thoughts. They went to Brittany for a holiday – their last as a family – exploring the coast of rose-coloured granite, and Stanley had come right out and asked him, 'What means die? What means dead?' Stanley and Cherry had decided on a policy early on, not to lie, not to dress things up, and so Jane had told him exactly what it meant. 'It means you stop breathing, your heart stops beating. Your brain stops thinking. And it's like that for ever. You never come back from it.'

  Stanley had digested this, his eyes wide and fixed on the

  middle distance as they were whenever he thought hard about things, and said: 'Will I die?'

  'Everyone dies, mate.'

  'Oh,' Stanley said, and his eyes turned glassy with tears. 'Will you die?'

  Jane nodded.

  'Before me?'

  Jane had almost said I hope so but thought that would confuse him. 'Yes, Stan.'

  'Oh, Dad. I don't want to die. I don't want you to die.'

  'I don't want to either. But don't worry. It won't be for a long, long time.'

  Stanley had become a little more clingy than usual after that. He woke up in the night and called for him and he would go, sensing Cherry stiffen beside him. 'I luff you with all my heart, Dad. I luff you for a five hundred million hundred three minutes.'

  Cherry seemed to resent the attention Stanley was giving Jane. And he was at a loss to explain why his son was favouring him. 'It's just a phase,' he suggested. 'A male thing. It doesn't mean he loves you any less just because he doesn't tell you. Boys can be awkward sods.'

  Cherry rejected this. She claimed Jane was encouraging Stanley's ambivalence, using it as a wedge between him and his mother. Jane had been shocked. 'Why would I do that? Why would I want to turn Stanley against you?'

  'Because you want custody of him.'

  He remembered the impact of that, how it had floored him, numbed his tongue. She had that ability, to throw something into an argument that was unexpected, that didn't follow the fight's trajectory or logic. How had he responded? He could barely recall it in the wake of her face twisting, the demand that blasted out of her. He must have said something like 'But I don't want a divorce.'

  No, but I do, Richard. I do.

  The compression of distance through the binoculars was difficult to cope with. It disorientated him sometimes when he saw some flash of difference in the brown reaches of burnt land and removed the glasses to check its position in relation to him to discover that he couldn't see it. Then he didn't know where to aim the binoculars in order to find it again. Once he had it back in his sights he was more careful, and discovered that it was much farther away than he had believed. He had never used such powerful lenses before: all the binoculars he had ever tried previously had been weak; toys, really.

  In the main, these flashes he saw were tangles of fleece snagged on barbed wire, or fragments of plastic, or on one occasion a bottle-green sequined dress stuck against a fence post, arms waving hysterically in the wind. Every sighting caused a palpitation in his heart. He desperately wanted it to be someone, but he didn't know what that might mean. If this was some kind of assault from an aggressive country, there was every chance that an invasion was under way. He didn't want to be clapped in irons and sent to a concentration camp, or shot dead on the spot. He also didn't want to be hampered by an injured companion, or have to tend to someone who might be slowly choking to death on their own lungs.

  He walked. He was back on the A1 now, the tarmac swollen and broken, melted and resealed in strange lava patterns. It reminded him of a river's currents frozen in a snapshot. He stopped thinking about the binoculars and the possibility of survivors for a while and ate up some ground. His boots were comfortable; no blisters yet. He felt stronger. He ate little and often. He had filled a three-pint water bladder from bottles in the cellar of buildings just south of Scremerston and stowed them in the water pouch of his rucksack. It was a heavy pack now, but he kept reminding himself of the troops yomping from Carlos Water to Teal on East Falkland. They never gave up, and there was death waiting for some of them at the end of it all.

  There were countless fields on either side of the dual carriageway. The haze made all that acreage of black-brown tremble. There were sections of the road that had not been barred by vehicles, but there was a surprising amount of traffic. He averted his head when he walked by, but something wasn't making sense. He snorted a little, mildly amazed that he could think like this in the middle of an entire situation that wasn't making sense.

  The day passed quicker when he was intent on the road. He bypassed Haggerston with barely a glimpse at its castle. Further east lay the causeway connecting Lindisfarne to the mainland. The Holy Island was beyond reach now. The sea would have erased that link for ever. Maybe the island itself was drowned. He looked through the binoculars but could only see a riot of ocean and sky, as if the two elements were wrestling over a prize. He walked on, developing his rhythm. He started chanting Stanley's name, and his own, and Cherry's too. A triumvirate to spur him on, even though he knew there were only ever likely to be limited permutations of the three by the time he found them. But you never knew . . . a national disaster, a child in peril, estranged parents reunited. It happened all the time in Hollywood.

  Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard.

  As a child he'd attended Scouts a few times. Hadn't stuck it. There was something about uniforms after school that sapped the enthusiasm from him. That and the dumb tasks they set at this particular hut: you and two friends are going on a three-day camping expedition, so how many boxes of cornflakes are you going to need? He had to get home by himself afterwards if his dad was on nights and had the car. He'd alleviate the monotony of a long walk back in the dark, often accompanied by rain, by doing the Scout jog, which was twenty paces running, twenty paces at a fast walk: the fartlek before its time.

  Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard.

  Jane was intoxicated by the distance he'd managed. His heart was pumping hard and he was alive. He was alive. He stopped to rest and lifted the Nikon glasses to sweep the area south of Alnwick. Newcastle was a knot of wet iron in the distance. He could make it in maybe four days, if he marched hard. The road was not flat, but it was not so undulating or jagged as to hamper him too greatly. The dried meat and dried fruit he had found in a farmhouse cellar was keeping his spirits up; he'd even lucked upon a couple of slabs of dark chocolate in a tin marked IZZY'S STASH – KEEP OUT! He wasn't wanting for energy. But finding such food, such good food, made him wonder a little about the future, despite his intention to keep himself focused on the present. The vegetation frazzled, the food chain compromised. No animals. No food. How much of this kind of thing was going to be buried treasure in the months and years to come? He could see himself stumbling, cadaverous, through villages, his clothes flapping on him, too weak to unscrew the top from an undiscovered jar of jam he might come across in a forgotten pantry. What about water? An image, unbidden, of vultures sitting on the shattered street lamps of Oxford Street, the birds' beaks stained crimson. An image of himself, a scarecrow, shambling beneath their keen eyes, calling out for his family, calling out for anybody, but there was nobody left. Just six million corpses mummifying in the furnace blast of a storm that would not cease.

  Jane forced his thoughts outward, and his eye caught the feather nestled into his rucksack. No birds. No nothing. No people.

  He snatched up the feather and studied it. He retrieved the guidebook and savagely flicked through the pages, looking for something that might help him identify its provenance. The pictures of birds calmed him, even though he knew they were etern
ally trapped between these pages, that he'd catch no sight of them here. A big wedge-shaped feather it was, edged with broad sections of creamy white. He held it to his cheek, felt the fragile, firm ruffle as he ran his fingers along its edge, then tried to scent something of the bird via the quill, but there were no smells beyond that of the burned, congealed sky.

  He thumbed through the book until he found the large predators. He had to look away from some of the pages, the ones of photographs of raptors rending their prey. The slashing talons, the hooked razor beaks. The eyes were the worst, though. Angry, feral; alien colours. Piercing. He had always been squeamish. Jane tried to imagine being the focus of that unswerving attention as an eagle came at him, claws outstretched, great wings spread in some sacrilegious cuneiform aping, but thankfully it kept sliding away at the crucial point.

  He found what he was looking for. The white tail. A yellow beak. Insane, intent eyes. Even as the rain squirmed across the paper, discolouring it, he read that the sea eagle was either a dedicated loner or a loyal partner. Once hunted to extinction in Scotland, it was now mainly confined to the west coast, having been reintroduced to the countryside in the latter decades of the twentieth century. So what was it doing here, east coast, many miles south of its natural habitat? He must have made a mistake, but the diagram of the feather in the book might have been a copy of the real thing clenched between his fingers. An ornament in a hotel room. That was all. A gewgaw. A knick-knack.

  It was placed there for you.

  Jane dropped the feather suddenly, as if it had turned hot. He stared at it and thought about what he'd just suggested to himself, what that might mean if it was true. Then he picked it up and threaded it back through the elastic ties of his rucksack. It seemed somehow profane to leave something so beautiful to decay into this grim landscape. Gift or find, he would keep it. Perhaps it would bring him luck. At the very least it would make an exciting present for Stanley.

  He walked until the low cloud definition began to increase. Shadows building. The sun going down. He remembered flights out of gloomy airfields penned down with rain. Jets jostled by weather, nosing for the cloud banks. The fog of them, dense against the windows, then the sudden break into astonishing, lovely blue. He thought now of a cloud cover without break, constantly mashing and folding against itself as it greedily smothered the world. Which way was this going? Nuclear winter or greenhouse? He realised he'd stopped walking. He was staring at the underbelly of cloud and its greasy gamut of colours. They changed as if inspired by moods. His, maybe. Industrial colours sometimes, alchemic: a range of molten smoky hues. Burnt gold, white-hot slag, the cold blue of steel. Sometimes the colours of pathology, of disease. Or mildew and smog, oil slicks and blood. They contained a look of something seriously damaged that could not be fixed. The rain that slashed out of them was muddy orange, like rust in water. He had to keep swiping the back of his gloves across the black Os of his goggles; his view was perpetually gritty, streaked. He wondered how long the rain would take to eat through the lenses.