Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “No. You said not. We agreed. No going near the river.”

  “I was wrong. Come on.”

  Marina followed so she could keep protesting. “I won’t.”

  “When we get there, when we find somewhere to rest and eat, I’ll try and explain what will happen if you don’t get back to your hideaway as soon as you can. For now, if we meet anyone, anyone, you mustn’t let go of me. Not even for a second. All right?”

  Fuming at her betrayal, Marina shook her head.

  Iseult turned wearily away. “Let’s hope we get lucky and don’t see anyone. I’ll be more careful now.”

  26

  The first people they came across made no sound at all. Marina and Iseult had arrived at a barrier of felled trees in the road. The raw stumps in the hedges were still caked with congealed sap. Beyond the barricade a tall white car lay on its side, its windows smashed, and beyond the car were two men smashed as well. Marina wondered what they were doing flat and motionless among the chipped wood and dead leaves on the road when they obviously needed help, until it struck her that they were dead. Dead like animals, empty bodies sprawled by her feet. Their bloodied faces weren’t faces anymore, just parts still stuck together, skin and jelly and bone. The tang of sickly burning in the air was heavier. It smelled like smoke, but without the warm sweetness of wood. They’d walked up from the secretive valley of the estuary into open fields. From there the thick haze to the northeast was visible as a thing with its own shape and presence, squatting like the shadow of a cloud over a quadrant of the horizon. Sometimes when they paused to rest they heard suggestions of a distant clamor, as if that cloud had a voice. Iseult looked increasingly anxious.

  “We can’t turn back,” she said, as much to herself as to Marina. “We’d starve.”

  Marina would have refused to turn back anyway. They passed another signpost: two miles. But she was no longer thinking of how surprised and happy Horace would be when they found him. Something felt wrong. None of this looked like the world he talked about when he came to visit.

  The hubbub became more distinct. Iseult stopped again.

  “Can you go any faster?” she said.

  Marina’s feet were aching and hunger was trying to tug her stomach out through her backbone. She hurried nevertheless. Iseult had gained a desperate energy from somewhere; Marina had to force herself along to keep up. They came to a junction. The narrow littered lane they’d been following emptied suddenly into a space so wide Marina could scarcely believe it was a road at all: she could have lain herself across it six times. The sign pointed right and said mawnan 1. But the noise they could hear came from the right too. It sounded almost like the wild chatter of the overflowing rivers, except that it hummed instead of whispering: a stream of voices. The helicopter was closer too. Marina looked the other way and saw it growing big in the sky, droning, floating toward them, a fat stag beetle thudding its jaws as it flew.

  Iseult hesitated at the junction as if unsure which way to turn. The rumbling from both directions grew louder. Marina had a sudden image of the world folding in from each end, being torn up and crushed together, with her in the middle. She put her hands over her ears.

  Iseult took her thin jacket off. She surprised Marina by giving her a sudden tight hug, and then surprised her even more by pulling the jacket down over her like an executioner’s hood.

  The next minutes were a bizarre and terrifying dream. Iseult’s voice came to her, close by her ear but muffled: “Just keep going. Keep going.” She felt herself being pushed along. All she could see was their feet. “Keep going. We’ll be all right. Stay hidden.” But above and around Iseult’s voice a great pandemonium of noise was gathering and spreading, a bedlam. The sky began to pulse. There was a sudden startling massed shout, people Marina couldn’t see all speaking up at the same time.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Someone’s hurt.”

  And then Iseult’s voice, right above her, shouting too, shouting at someone else. “Let me through. Let me through!”

  “What’s happened?”

  “That’s a kid.”

  “Head wound,” Iseult shouted again. Everyone had to shout. The sky was being hacked by relentless blows. “My daughter. Let me pass!” They swerved and all but stumbled. Marina pressed her head against Iseult, trying to hide from the dreadful overhead crescendo, and did her best not to trip. She was being pushed and squeezed. Without being able to see, she knew all of a sudden that there was a crowd around her, people in unimaginable numbers.

  “Bastards!”

  “She all right?”

  “Let them pass, it’s a kid!”

  “Food,” Iseult shouted. “Has anyone got anything to eat?”

  They bumped and shuffled. Marina felt things brush against her, other bodies. The sky became a blanket of vibrating noise, smothering her, so loud she could feel it in her clenched teeth. Then a voice tore out of it, a huge monstrous distorted voice like a mouth made out of a metal drum. It spoke in lumps of slow speech. GO—BACK—TO—YOUR—HOMES, it said, as if it had found Marina’s secret fear inside her and dragged it out to write it in vast letters on the bottom of the clouds. I—REPEAT—GO—BACK—TO—YOUR—HOMES—ESSENTIAL—SUPPLIES—WILL—BE—DISTRIBUTED. “This way, this way,” Iseult kept saying in her ear, though the only thing keeping her going was the constant pressure of the arms around her. She had to keep moving her feet just to stop herself being pushed over. The crowd around them jeered. WE—ARE—DOING—EVERYTHING—WE—CAN—TO—RESTORE—POWER. “And we’re doing everything we can to overthrow it!” someone nearby screamed: there was a huge laugh and a discordant cheer. “Can anyone spare food?” Iseult yelled. “Anyone. Please. Oh, thank you. Bless you.” I—REPEAT—CLEAR—THE—ROADS—AND—RETURN—TO—YOUR—HOMES—A—STATE—OF—EMERGENCY—HAS—BEEN—DECLARED. A chant was gathering strength on the ground, the bedlam of voices coming together, saying Down something, Down with something, like a spell to make the helicopter fall. Iseult was also shouting all the while, begging, cajoling people out of the way. Then suddenly it seemed like they were going faster and the throng was behind them, and Iseult’s voice was close to her ear again, saying, “Well done, we’re all right, we’re almost there,” but her arms kept the hood clamped over Marina’s head and the welter of angry noise still filled the air. Marina had a sudden and sickeningly eager longing for the silence of sleep, of deep water. Running footsteps passed by, with a quick exchange of conversation (“You all right?”—“She’ll be okay”—“Are they fighting?”—“I don’t know, they’re just back that way, is there somewhere we can get food and water?”—“Ask in the church”). Shutting her eyes helped, but she couldn’t shut her ears. Without meaning to she began to whine, drowning out the babel with her own voice. Iseult stroked her arm as she pushed her along and tried to murmur something through the hood; Marina didn’t hear it. Someone else came running past. Everyone in the world was here, she thought. All those empty houses, the people had all been sucked out of them and thrown into this one place. She should never have come. She thought of her home: bare feet in empty corridors, motes of dust falling slowly in front of familiar windows whose view never changed.

  She noticed after a while that her feet had stopped.

  She heard the noise she was making, suddenly. Ahh ahh ahh ahh ahh. It sounded horrible. She made it cease. Iseult’s whisper appeared in the space it had vacated, saying, “Shh, it’s okay, shh.” There were no other voices. The shouting crowd was gone. The rumble in the sky had receded as well and turned back into a helicopter, the far-off throb she recognized.

  “You’re okay. They’re gone now. Okay? We’re here, we made it. Marina? Do you want to see?”

  Iseult wasn’t pushing her anymore. Her grip eased. She lifted her jacket away and put it back on while Marina accustomed herself to the daylight.

  “Here.” She handed Marina a couple of small b
iscuits.

  The road they were in was lined on both sides with more of the miniature houses, as if using them for hedges. Each one was different, the confusion of shapes and colors almost as bad as the massed and mangled shouting of the angry crowd. Iseult saw her cringing and held her close again, steering her toward the closest house, a dirty white box behind a screen of straggling bushes. “Number thirty-six,” she said (and now Marina saw a tile by a door with that same number written on it). “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “Eat. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Marina nibbled a biscuit. It was intensely salty, deliciously so; she gulped the rest.

  “Slowly.”

  “Where did these come from?”

  “Someone gave them to me. I’ve got some bread as well. We’re all right. And that’s the house. Here we are.”

  “Which one?”

  “Lightfoot’s house. Gav’s friend. This is where he told you he was going first.”

  Marina knew with complete certainty that Gawain was not here. He’d never be in a place like this.

  “The houses don’t look abandoned either,” Iseult went on. “Not all of them. A lot of people must have stayed in this village. Look on the doorstep.” Marina did, though she didn’t see why she should until Iseult explained. “Mud. From shoes. Someone’s been going in and out.”

  “What should we do?”

  Iseult straightened and took a deep breath. “Let’s try knocking.”

  This meant squeezing past the wet bushes and banging on the door and calling. They tried that for a while. Everything else had fallen quiet again around them. While they sat on the doorstep, Iseult shared out the bread and the last of the raisins. A bucket under the gutter was half-full of rainwater. They drank some of it, scooping with their hands. It was strange to be sitting without getting ready to stand and walk again. The idea that they’d arrived where they were going was hard for Marina to grasp. Nothing seemed to have changed. She was if anything even more tired than she’d felt before, and eating a few salty mouthfuls had only made her hungrier.

  Iseult must have been thinking something similar. “We’ll give it a day,” she said. “We’d better find somewhere to sleep. If she doesn’t come by tomorrow we’ll go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Home.”

  “We should find Horace instead.”

  Iseult shuffled closer to her and took her hand. “Marina.”

  “What?”

  “Your friend Horace . . . That’s Horace Jia, isn’t it?”

  “His other name? That’s right.”

  “The Chinese boy.”

  “His mother’s from China.”

  “I’m afraid,” Iseult said, weighing out her words cautiously in a way that made Marina think of her father, “we won’t find him here.”

  Marina felt like retorting How do you know? For some reason, though, she just stared at her hands in her lap.

  “You haven’t seen him since the snow began, have you.”

  She shook her head.

  Iseult spoke gently now. “It was on the news. I watched his poor mother. He went missing early on.”

  Marina didn’t say anything. She felt stupid. She felt as though she’d always known that something had happened to Horace. Otherwise he’d have come to see her, no matter how busy he was or how difficult it was to go anywhere in the snow.

  “He and Gav,” her guide went on, “on the same day. I was so angry with him. I didn’t even know who he was but I thought, Why is that boy the one everyone’s trying to find? Why is his mother the one who’s crying on TV?”

  “So he’s lost too,” Marina said, dully. Of course he was. Him and everyone else.

  “He is,” Iseult said, picking up Marina’s hands and squeezing them. “But we’ll find them. My sister said.”

  • • •

  No one came to open house number 36. After waiting a while they went inside the house on the other side of the road, so they could watch across the street. They didn’t use the door, which was locked too. Instead Iseult led them around the back of the house, into a tiny wet space with a washing line and brambles, and broke a window with a slab of slate fallen from the roof. She scraped away the glass carefully and then reached in and undid the latch.

  “If these people come back they’ll get a shock,” she said, as she swung the window open. “But I doubt they will. Not if there’s some kind of mad war starting.”

  “It’s all right for us to rest inside?” Marina peered in doubtfully. She saw a tiny room full of ugly colored surfaces squashed too close together.

  “Yes. It’s fine.”

  They climbed in. Iseult went first, sweeping bits of glass away, and then helped Marina after her. Now she was the doll in the dollhouse, surrounded by all the dollhouse’s furniture that was too close together, sofas and chairs made out of scraps of patterned cloth or smooth and faded like old toys. She felt as if anything she touched might break, but Iseult walked through the rooms as if it was where she’d always lived, opening doors, looking behind and under everything. “Neat and tidy,” she said, as if the state of the house annoyed her. She went up a set of narrow walled-in stairs and came back down a minute later with a yellow towel and some black socks.

  “You can clean up your foot a bit,” she said, handing them to Marina. “There might be some water in the toilet cistern. It must have stopped bleeding by now. I found a box of plasters anyway.”

  Marina didn’t want to sit on any of the chairs, so she found a space on the floor, which was like a towel itself, pale blue and slightly fuzzy. She eased off her shoes while Iseult went on looking around in other rooms. She knew there was still a puddle of blood in the heel because she’d been able to feel it while she walked. Some of it spilled out; the floor soaked it up like cloth, leaving a dark blot. The bandage was wet. As soon as she peeled it off a red bubble swelled up on her skin.

  She wiped her foot with the dry towel, wondering whether she ought to tell Iseult about the little man in the hedge, and how she could do it without mentioning his embarrassing question. Dried blood had crusted all over her like another layer of old mud. The black socks were very thin, and very perfectly stitched, without any sign of patching or holes. They looked a bit small for her. She unrolled them to check, and saw labels sewn around their tops with a name printed on them:

  H JIA

  • • •

  They sat on the narrow staircase together, the woman higher up. From there they could watch the road and the house opposite through a small square window beside the front door. Whenever someone passed Iseult leaned forward to put her fingers over Marina’s lips, though they were talking almost in whispers anyway. It happened only a handful of times before the afternoon became evening and it was too dark to see; solitary people going one way or the other, usually carrying bags, one pushing a squeaky wire cart whose tiny wheels kept catching in cracks in the road. A couple of cars came crawling and bumping along.

  The rest of the time they talked.

  Or rather Marina did. She started by talking all about Horace. She kept thinking of different things to say, and they all got mixed up in the wrong order, and so she ended up telling Iseult all about Holly as well, and then about Corbo, and then about Gawain, because Iseult wanted to know about everything he said, everything he’d done, no matter what order she told it in. It was her thaw. For the weeks of winter since Gawain had left, she’d wrapped herself in painful silence. Now, suddenly, sitting in Horace’s abandoned house, she began to flow again. She found herself wanting to tell things she hadn’t even let herself think about before, about Gwen, about her mother, about Daddy choosing to die instead of going on looking after her. Iseult listened quietly in a way that reminded her very much of Gawain. Neither of them started crying. It wasn’t like that now, for some reason. There were a lot of th
ings the woman didn’t understand the first time, or even the second, but Marina didn’t mind explaining again. For the first time that day she was comfortable. They’d found clothes she could wear, a sort of padded coat and a pair of trousers that fit her at the waist though they only came down to her shins. They’d shared out the last bits of food Iseult had been given. She answered all the questions and told the woman everything she could think of. It turned out to be a relief, shucking off her stagnant misery like her wet and filthy clothes.

  “Shall I tell you something now?”

  Marina hadn’t noticed they’d stopped talking. She’d almost fallen asleep without knowing it. The house, Horace’s house, had gone nearly dark and the comfortable feeling had spread all through her.

  “I think,” Iseult said, not waiting for an answer, “it was you I came all this way to find.”

  “You said Gwen never told you anything about me.”

  “I didn’t know it was you I was looking for.” This was Iseult’s proper voice, not the other one. It wasn’t warm like Gwen’s, and Marina could hear its edge of suffering, but there was no distance in it, nothing kept back. “I think I had to let go of everything else before you could come along. You know what I was about to do, don’t you. When you found me. Perhaps that’s how far you have to go before something like this can happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “Meeting you. A miracle.”

  She’s tired too, Marina thought.

  “I didn’t deserve Gav,” Iseult said. “But I’ll try and deserve you.”

  “The man who did the telephone said you’d be my guide.”

  “Did he? Then I will. That’s what I’ll do.”

  “He must have meant we’d find our way here. Do we stay here now? What do we do tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see if we can find the professor. Though I don’t think we will. But it doesn’t matter. I know where we’re going now.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m going with you. I’ll take you home.”

  She was about to argue but something stopped her: a hand in the dark, coming to rest on her shoulder.