• • •
She thanked whoever it was who was watching over her that she’d remembered to pack wellies. There was nothing for it now but to walk.
20
She soon forgot that she was more than halfway there. The miles that had sped away under her tires felt as remote as her childhood dreams of flying. She forgot that there’d ever been anything in the world except unremitting white. Where the surface of the snow had softened even slightly, or where its deceptively weightless accumulation had gone on perfectly undisturbed, the wheels of the bike sank far too deep to turn and she had to haul herself and her whole load along as if dragging them underwater. On the wider roads, the ones that followed broader valleys and connected villages and towns, she found parallel strips packed down hard by the tires of tractors or cars. These were a hundred times easier to follow, but the broad valleys ran northwest-southeast, across her route instead of along it, and the villages, she quickly learned, were places to avoid.
She trudged toward one late that first afternoon and saw five or six people in the road ahead. They were standing around a makeshift sled, unloading plastic crates and split logs. They turned to stare at her as one.
“Clear off,” said a woman of about Iz’s age. “Go on.”
“Cheryl?” The man nearest her looked doubtful.
“Didn’t you hear me? Back that way.”
Iz knew genuine hostility when she saw it. She thought of the supplies stashed in her panniers and began wrestling the bike around without a word.
“It’s a time for charity,” she heard the man say.
“Sod that. She can get her charity somewhere else, thank you very much. Somewhere that’s got some left over.” The woman called Cheryl raised her voice at Iz’s back. “Wandering around looking for answers. Bugger off. All of you.”
“Don’t try coming back,” another woman said, emboldened.
“The good angels are watching us,” the man muttered. He sounded full of shame.
“Doing a brilliant job, aren’t they? Stop mooning after her like that and shift some wood.”
She was passed by tractors on the road two or three times. She thought they might stop and help, or at least ask her where she was going, but no, the hard-faced men and women who drove them wouldn’t even look at her as she went by. Like the villagers, they took her for one of the pilgrims, one of the deluded or desperate thousands who had flocked to the southwest in the weeks immediately after the appearance of the winged monstrosity. Iz had seen them on TV too, of course, jamming the roads as the snow rebuffed them, battling on foot if they had the courage, camping in fields like fragments of an army in December retreat, turning to vandalism and theft as their progress failed. They’d mostly given up or been removed by now, so she thought. If there were others making the same journey she never saw them, though she was sure that no one with a need less than hers could possibly have kept going. There were many hours when she’d have given up herself if she’d had anything at all to go back to. When the lanes steepened and the snow was deep, half a mile was an hour’s work. In the last week of February she gained barely forty miles as the birds flew.
Shelter wasn’t a problem. There were abandoned houses and hamlets everywhere, and farm buildings where she could creep in under cover of darkness as long as she heard no dogs. The houses had already been broken into. Foxes had taken possession before her and snarled as they fled. They came back in the dark; she heard them scratching and whining beyond closed doors. Food was the challenge. When she saw a helicopter dumping supplies over the high villages between the Exe and the Taw she knew, if she hadn’t known before, that the little cash remaining to her was worth nothing. The world of exchanging money for things had gone, as Ruth had prophesied. (“It’s not real,” she shouted, pleading with her listeners, her passion making everything she said sound wonderfully obvious. “There’s no hope for us if we don’t start looking at what’s really here.” People had thrown banknotes onto campfires.) She melted snow in her hands to drink and hoarded her remaining supplies with obsessive exactness. From her days of not eating at all she knew how little she could survive on, but even so she might have stopped one day and not started again if she hadn’t met with occasional unexpected kindness and luck. At one clump of dripping barns the farmer came out to call off her dogs and took pity on what she saw, returning with a plastic bag of soft potatoes and some strips of dried apple. And one evening Iz discovered, behind a broken gate and a driveway lined with fat-budded camellias, a house that had not yet been ransacked, perhaps because its last defenders had only recently abandoned it. She broke in and found packets of soup and drawers with things she needed, bandages, socks. The owners had left behind a lot of photos of themselves, on every mantelpiece and every window ledge. The girl had excellent teeth and impossibly shapely teenager legs. The two boys looked like half the children at Gavin’s school, blond and louche, grinning the grins of children waiting for the future to drop all its satisfactions in their laps. The father and mother smiled breezily in every picture as if they never sweated and stank and shouted at their children, but Iz could see through them. She pressed her nose to the glass and looked into their eyes and saw him thinking about his thinning hair and his vanished ambitions and her hating her daughter for being so gorgeous. She saw all of it, no matter how well they thought they hid it. They hid the drink too. She found vodka lying flat behind packets of rice on the highest shelf. When their lovely perfect children had finished gawping at Internet porn or bitching on the phone about living in the country and had gone to bed, the parents sat downstairs and drank to save themselves from the horror of their days. The children would drink too. Iz saw it all in their faces. The older boy already drank, and the girl did drugs, and the younger boy was a blond bully who liked making the quiet boys at school cry and would grow up and marry and hurt his wife for fun. When she was ready to leave, Iz piled all the paper and cotton she could find in a heap at the bottom of the wooden staircase and set fire to it. The house seemed reluctant to burn, but for a long time afterward as she slogged away she could smell something bitter in the wind, and a smudge of smoke stained the grey horizon behind.
She breathed air so sharp and cold, it was like swallowing ice. Then, one day, it changed; the wind became damp, salty, southerly. The sky changed too, turning whiter and wispier. By the afternoon there were spits of rain.
She had no way of knowing what day it was, of course. Nor did she know—though she might have, if she’d studied her maps—that on that same day she’d come over yet another level-topped rise and crossed into the watershed of the River Tamar. Least of all could she have guessed how long it would take her to cross the river and the forty-odd miles beyond, a distance to which three months ago no one would have given any thought at all, because three months ago forty miles was, literally, nothing, half an hour on the highway, a minor interval, a negligible gap between here and there.
She couldn’t miss the tentative signs of a thaw. As the top of the snowpack lost its icy veneer, pushing the bike ceased being merely difficult and became impossible. She went back to the moldering ruin she’d spent the previous night in and sat there until the next dark, waiting for the overnight freeze to resurface the lanes with a hard crust, but the cold stayed its hand that night, and the next. Dawn felt distinctly earlier. On the third morning it came accompanied by birdsong.
She abandoned the bike and set out walking, two of the panniers in hand. For a brief while it was actually better than struggling with clogged wheels. Then her arms began to ache, and then her hands, and then at the first gentle rise in the road her legs started burning as badly as they had when she’d set out from London. A few hours later she’d learned the new scale of her journey. No more measuring it out in miles; it was half mile now, quarter miles, the next turn in the road.
Even the smallest detour was now unthinkable. Villages could not be avoided if they lay in her way. Wherever she en
ded up when she ran out of energy would be where she’d sleep, one way or another. She inched toward the next place large enough to have its own name, knowing there’d at least be roofs and walls there, hoping to find them completely abandoned. Many of the villages were. She’d seen those pictures on the news too: stunned pensioners being coaxed into helicopters, rows of camp beds in school halls in the bigger towns along the main roads. But even before the village’s church tower came in sight, she smelled smoke.
She slunk toward the jumble of houses and heard people moving about, talking. The sounds were strange to her. She’d lost any sense of kinship with people. She was an animal, she thought, a fox or a rat, coming stealthily in search of a dark corner to hide in and food to steal. With animal patience she waited until evening came on and then crept to the edges of the village. The smoke rose from a single building farther in, where the voices were concentrated. Whoever had decided to go on living here, they’d obviously gathered in a single house, sharing whatever warmth and company they had left. She stayed well out of sight until there was barely enough light left to see by and then stole to the nearest houses, trying doors carefully until she found a broken one, stepping quickly and quietly into the dim ruin inside. She felt her way to an upstairs room, closed its door behind her, and crawled into the narrow space between bed and wall to sleep.
Bangs and whispered giggles woke her. She jerked upright, heart hammering, feeling cornered. Someone—more than one person—was coming in downstairs. She saw light under the door. They knocked something over below.
“Shhhhh!”
More giggling. There were two voices, one male, one female.
“Upstairs.”
“What’s wrong with the sofa?”
“Come on. Bloody hell, it’s cold.”
“Shhh!”
“Who’s going to hear us?”
“I don’t know. Just be quiet, will you?” This was the woman, sounding breathless.
“I’m not going to. I’m going to,” he shouted, “shout!”
“Shh! Danny!” Hysterical giggling. “Don’t!”
“‘Danny!’” he mimicked. “‘Don’t!’” Squeaks of stifled laughter. A crunching bang.
“Ow. Bollocks. Why hasn’t he set fire to all this yet?”
“Careful!”
“I’m coming in here tomorrow with an ax, I am. Chop it up. Look at that chair, that’d burn for hours. Where’s the stairs gone?” The light brightened in the landing outside the door. “Here, give me that.” Giggling, thumping, a brief wrestle and a squeak of eager surprise. They went still for a moment. They were breathing hard enough for Iz to hear from her hiding place.
“Upstairs,” the woman said, “quick.”
Iz started to feel for the clips on her panniers, wondering where the penknife was. The intruders clattered unsteadily up toward her, hurrying, the flashlight beams dipping and swaying like drunken moonlight. She squeezed herself tighter behind the bed. The door to the room banged open. Looking under the bed she saw two pairs of feet, one of them with dropped clothes tangled around the ankles.
“Come on,” the man said. His voice was thick.
“Urgh.” The woman stopped by the door. Her feet reeled away. “What’s that smell?”
“Christ!”
“It’s disgusting!”
“Shit. Something must have died in there.”
“It’s revolting.”
The flashlights bobbed around. “Dead mouse. Probably.”
“Urgh. Don’t say that. Where?”
“I don’t know. Could be anywhere.” The light fixed on the corner at the foot of the bed, catching the bottom of one of Iz’s panniers. The woman squeaked again.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That black thing! It’s a dead something.”
“Just some of Neil’s stuff. Come on, downstairs.” The man’s feet backed toward the door.
“It looked like something.”
“What do you mean, something? Oi, careful.” The woman had staggered against the wall. “Pull your knickers up. Christ.”
“I’m trying.”
“Shit, that smell. I’m going to be sick.”
“Let’s go somewhere else, Danny.”
“There’s nowhere else. There’s the sofa. This was your idea in the first place.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t feel like it now.”
“You don’t feel like it?”
“Not with a dead thing right there. It’s horrible.”
“Let’s just close the door then, all right?” The bedroom door slammed shut again. Iz took a deep breath. The voices stayed right outside, though, and now they were arguing instead of whispering. “Downstairs. Are you coming?”
“It’s still in there.”
“Christ, Tara. It’s only a mouse.”
“How d’you know? It looked like a big thing.”
“What did?”
“Behind the bed.”
“There wasn’t anything. Will you get your arse downstairs?”
“I’m not staying if I know there’s something in there. I can’t.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Danny, just go and look, all right?”
“You go.”
“I can’t!”
“‘I can’t!’” he squeaked. There was no giggling now.
“What if it’s one of those things?”
“What things?”
“Neil said there’s things in his house.”
“There’s no monsters in this village, you stupid cow.”
“Let me have the light.” Clumsy footsteps and banging. “I’m leaving. Right now.”
“Want me to look?”
“No!” A scream. “Don’t go in there!” The door swung open, light strobing madly as she tried to grab the flashlight from his hand.
“Thought you wanted me to. Eh?”
“Stop it!”
“All right, let’s have a look.” The feet clumped toward the bed. “Here, monster monster monster.”
“Danny!”
“Out you come, monstery. Let’s have a look at you.” The light came looming over the bed. Filled with instinctive fury, Iz twisted up toward it as if to bite. The man made a sound like an aborted cough and fell back, dropping the flashlight. The woman screamed. The flashlight had fallen right by Iz’s hand. She reached out quickly and switched it off. Now both of them screamed. She heard them crawling toward the stairs. She kicked out, making the bed scrape across the floor. The intruders shrieked and fell over each other and slid down the stairs in the dark, clattering and yelping their way out of the house.
• • •
It was perfectly quiet after that. Iz had almost fallen asleep when she had a strange dream.
“Tee hee,” a little voice whispered, somewhere close to her ear. Under the bed, perhaps. “Hoo hoo hoo.” She heard a spidery scamper.
“Who’s there?” Iz dreamed herself saying. She was too tired to move her head.
“Poo. Stinks.”
“Stinky,” agreed a slightly different voice. They sounded shrunken, as if heard through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Madam Stink.” A third voice, or maybe the first one again. Everything was blurry and sleepy and odd.
“Is it awake?”
“I’m awake,” she said, presumably wrongly.
“Made them scramble.”
“Scramble and tumble.”
“Ramble and scramble and rumble down stairs. Bangety bang.”
“No humpy fumbling.”
“Never again.”
“No more hump hump hump.”
“Shrivel up if he tries.”
“Make his sausage floppy.”
“Hoo hoo.”
“All t
hanks to Madam Stink.”
“Hee hee. Scared them shitty.”
“Might never come back. Out of the house for good and all. Never never never. Woo hoo. Hail Madam Stink.”
“Hail.”
“Hail.”
“Owe her one.”
“One or two.”
“One.”
“Two. One for him, one for her. Two humpers tumbled and scrambled.”
“Takes two to hump.”
“Two, then. Owe her two.”
“Two lucky slices for the stinky lady.”
“What does it want?”
“What?”
“What?”
“What does it need?”
“A wash. Poo.”
“Soapy water.”
“Feather beds.”
“Snowshoes.”
“Wings.”
“Hope.”
“Going somewhere. Stinks of the road. Where’s it going?”
“Gone to sleep.”
“I’m not asleep,” she said again. “I’m going to find my son.”
“Sssss.” There was agitated scratching. “Fibs.”
“Stinking fibber.”
“Hasn’t got a son.”
“Hasn’t got a daughter.”
“All dried up inside. Barren as bark.”
“On a humping to nothing.”
“Hump hump hump. No bun in the oven.”
“Not a bean.”
“Not a pea.”
“He is my son,” Iz protested, feeling hollow. “He is. I love him.”
“Sssss.”
“Fib fib fib.”
Anarchy Page 26
