by Rob Ewing
I can’t find more inspiration. Asking the blank page never works, so I put my jotter away.
There’s only a short memory, today. I get to the bottom of the sleeping bag to find it: deep down, back beside the biscuit crumbs and empty wrappers.
To the time when we definitely began to know that the world would for ever be different.
We’re at the supermarket. And the big strangeness is that everyone’s wearing a mask: all the shoppers, the lady on the till, even the man minding the door, letting one person in at a time, for one going out.
And the lights are off – apart from the light in one bit of the freezer section. There’s the sound and the stink of a generator – set up in the car park, with cables coming in just to keep that one freezer working.
I want to go to the playpark by the store and play with the other kids, but Mum tells me to stick close by her.
When it’s our turn to go in I hear Mum swear: ‘Fuck; they emptied the place.’
There is one long queue of people, going from the fridges, past the freezers, back to us.
The man on the till is only letting shoppers buy ten pounds’ worth. The people keep arguing with him for more, but he won’t allow it.
But it might not matter for us, because the shelves of the store are nearly all empty anyway.
Mum jangles her keys. She keeps looking around at the door, then the people taking food in front of us.
For shopping the rules have changed: you’re only allowed to take when you reach twenty places from the front of the queue. And that’s miles.
It’s strange how dirty shelves are when you see the back of them. I want to go and play there, in behind, but Mum holds my hand tight like I got a row.
Suddenly in front, someone shouts. Another person at the front – an old lady – has tripped over. Or did she fall? She kneels then starts to shake. This part is frightening and strange: but stranger still is what the adults do.
They begin to shout, scream. They hold their masks tight to their faces. And rather than helping, they move away from the woman, leaving her alone on the floor.
‘Out, out of here,’ Mum says.
She pulls me back to the car, even though I saw things we could’ve bought, even though we queued for ages.
We drive around to the other stores, but the queues are just the same, so we head home.
It’s on the west road that we see the ambulance, parked up in a sandy lay-by.
There’s white tape flapping in the wind, tied around spikes to make a square you can’t go into: just like when they found that rare orchid two summers ago.
But there’s no orchid this time.
Just a man lying flat.
Mum drives slow. She goes to roll her window down: but the ambulance-man waves her past, waving like he got furious at us for being nosy.
I come back up for air. So it was no use as a memory. It didn’t help – and now I’m thinking of what happened anyway. Not then, but nine days ago: in the hours after we found Mairi.
‘The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away.’ Father Boyd, the visiting priest, said that once, when he came to talk to us in the school about the meaning of Easter.
Except I think that the Lord shouldn’t take people when they’re only trying to help: that isn’t fair.
He should give first, then afterwards not be greedy or cruel with what he takes away.
Nine days ago
My eyes get used to seeing Mairi, which makes me remember bits of who she was. She was a flower at the Easter concert: growing big when the teacher fed her sunbeams from a torch. She was fidgety and busy at dancing. I saw her once shouting on her brother.
Now she has this new life; the same life as us. Where it’s being alive that counts, and where nobody makes concerts or holds classes for learning to dance.
And where it’s more normal to have scars on your face than not.
We wait on Elizabeth, to see what she’ll do, but she doesn’t act clever. She tries all types of knowing how a person might be safe: using her books, talking out the problem, asking the sky. Asking us.
It’s Alex who comes up with the idea of asking about her brother, so Elizabeth does that.
Mairi rubs the dirt on the palms of her hands into black strings, then wipes it free. After this she reaches in her pocket and takes out a crumpled drawstring purse.
She empties it on our barrier line of stones.
There’s five shells, some glass beads. Another key fob. Feathers. Plus a picture of her brother.
The colour in it got faded, the picture criss-crossed where she folded it too many times.
‘That’s from before,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Mairi, it’s great you’ve got a picture from before. But we need to know what he looked like after.’
Mairi doesn’t make a sign of hearing: instead just puts the collection back in her purse, all except the feather, which she watches for the way the wind ruffles it.
Me: ‘We could dig her brother out.’
‘Sure. We dig him out, look at the skin on his face. Because it’s easy to spot the scars on the rotten bony skeletons we see in houses. Great idea! The best yet. Well you can be the one to do that.’
Her voice goes hard, much harder than true kindness. I pretend not to notice. But anyway, Elizabeth is looking instead to see if Mairi heard, or got sad by hearing her brother called a skeleton, but she didn’t seem to.
‘The right thing is sometimes the wrong thing,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Like when you wanted to be near someone at the end. That was wrong, even though your heart said right.’
When she says this I wonder: will we be leaving Mairi behind? But then she shows another idea.
She takes out a ball of string from her rucksack and begins to unroll it. Then she walks on so that it trails and dangles behind her.
When it reaches the length of about five kids she beckons Mairi.
‘Stay that far away,’ she says. ‘Until we know better.’
We follow the shore road. We have to be strict with the string – though Elizabeth has now turned slowcoach, she’s walking funny, and Mairi keeps nearly bumping into the back of us.
‘Why are you walking so slow?’ I ask Elizabeth. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Forget about it,’ she says.
A long road, the North Bay ahead. One abandoned lorry, one dead sheep stuck in a fence.
Then we see the MacNeil brothers. But they’re not going away – instead they’re running towards us fast, so fast that Elizabeth stands in the road with her body in defence, ready for an argument. Then we hear Calum Ian shout—
‘Our dad’s here!’
We heard him the first time, but still: nobody can truly take this in. His whole body’s shaking and when he says again his voice goes as high as Alex’s, still higher when we make him say once more to be sure.
‘Your dad?’
‘You’ve got to come and see!’
For now the string-length gets forgotten. We follow him: to the church, to the community hall. There’s Our Lady – the statue of Mary – on its island in the bay. Another wind turbine, a broken or switched-off one this time.
The tide sitting slack. There’s a boat stabbed in mud on its keel. Another, on its side, half-broken, fallen onto the pier wall.
I see now that we imagined too much, or he got us ready for too much.
It is his dad’s boat. But just not his dad.
Mr MacNeil’s boat is in the bay, at the furthest end of the pier, roped at the outside of three others.
Duncan is there, shouting at us to come on, come on, shouting so his voice screams and cracks.
‘Remember his green ladder, look!’ Calum Ian says.
‘He bloody got back safe!’ Duncan shouts back at him. ‘We just have to find where he went!’
The boat’s been here a while. We can tell. It’s all dried up in mud. I feel let down – maybe Elizabeth does too – but we don’t say anything because that would spoil their time of getting to be excited.
‘Dad,’ Calum Ian says, his voice gone flatter.
The boat’s made of wood, metal. There’s a small house, which Calum Ian calls the cabin, with windows like a lighthouse, plus a metal frame at the back which he calls the winch. Then on the side, between lines of blue paint, a name, written in wavy black letters: Mary Anne.
The wires from the winches of the other boats are tangled up. With the tide out there’s maybe ten feet to fall onto sand and stone. Even so, Calum Ian wants us all to climb across: all except Mairi, who keeps her own distance this time, waiting for us on a bump of grass beside the pier wall, chin on her knees.
Alex comes as well. He has to stretch hard to reach from one boat to the other. The furthest boat is Mr MacNeil’s. It stinks of mould and dried-out seaweed. At the back of it are lots of slippery green nets, piled in tangles.
In the middle of the boat there’s an open cardboard box, with lots of smaller boxes in cellophane inside.
The smaller boxes have gone damp – especially near the edges where there was no shelter from the cabin.
‘So he did bring back supplies,’ Calum Ian says. ‘He did his job; he did it right. He was a hero! Then all he had to do – it wasn’t a big deal – all he had to do was come and find us. Rescue us.’
He frees one of the small boxes. The paper of it flakes into powder. It only takes a rub with his fingers and the whole side of the box crumbles away.
‘Medicines.’
We knew, already. It’s the same medicine we’ve seen when New Shopping in people’s houses; same as beside the Last Adult. The medicine that Mum delivered.
Boxes and boxes of it.
‘No one got any,’ I say.
‘They argued before he left,’ Calum Ian says. ‘Mum and Dad, all night. Dad said he was going on a mercy trip. Mum said, “Whose mercy? We can keep the fish you get for us.” But see, it wasn’t only fish. It was more important than that. He was trying to save the whole people, not just us.’
We scrape open some more of the boxes, but they’re all the same kind. After this, we search the cabin. Nothing: apart from a dream-catcher hanging from a radio with a curly cord, and one of Duncan’s old drawings, of a man on a motorbike jumping through a ring of fire. Duncan says it was his dad’s favourite.
Calum Ian clicks the radio switch, but it’s not working. After this he puts his hands softly on the boat’s steering wheel.
‘The view he had.’
In the cupboards we find tea, sugar and a cup which says WORLD’S GREATEST CATCH. There’s a pair of blue overalls, very oily, then an orange waterproof suit, which reeks of sea-mould.
Calum Ian starts to look through all the cupboards again: and for a dumb second I think they’re actually looking for their dad inside the cupboards – but then Elizabeth says: ‘I might know where he went.’
Which makes me realise that they’re only opening cupboard doors because they don’t want to start looking properly.
It’s not hard to work out where all the people in this village ended up. Around the Community Centre there’s too many cars. They’re parked in a jam, just like the roadblock we found back on the coast road.
The door of the centre is taped shut with criss-crossed BIOHAZARD tape. At the top of the jam of cars there’s an ambulance, with its back doors open, so that the inside of it got filthy with bird shit and leaves and sand.
Mairi follows us again, but now doesn’t want to come anywhere near the Community Centre. She waits just outside the gates – curled up, but still watching, not looking away for one second.
Calum Ian looks at Mairi, then at me and Elizabeth.
‘You decide to keep her?’
I see that Elizabeth doesn’t want to talk about it – or doesn’t want to tell what she decided. And for once, Calum Ian doesn’t turn it into an argument.
Duncan is sitting on the steps leading to the Centre door. As I get close I hear him whisper, ‘Why didn’t you come for us, Dad?’
Calum Ian goes to stand beside him. He takes out our bottle of red sterilised and drinks, afterwards wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
‘Anyway,’ he offers Duncan some, ‘Dad should’ve kept to his side of the bargain. And now, what: do we have to find him because he didn’t come and find us?’
He stares at the taped-up door. Some birds fly over. We watch them as if there was nothing else to watch.
‘I’ll go inside,’ Elizabeth says.
Calum Ian just keeps on looking up at the birds.
She adds, ‘Mainly because you did it for me. Not because I think you’ve been a good friend, because you haven’t always. But because you did it for me.’
Calum Ian swirls the water until there’s a whirlpool.
‘I’m not going to ask you to do it.’
But Elizabeth doesn’t answer: instead, she just starts to get ready.
She opens up her rucksack, takes out her perfume-hanky, sprays it twice. Then she puts spare plastic bags on her feet and on her hands.
After this Calum Ian stands in front of her, to put his goggles over her head. He sprays her perfume-hanky on the outside – five times for luck – while Elizabeth holds it firmly over her mouth.
‘Did I leave any gaps? I could tape it around twice? Do I look stupid? Or scared?’
‘Never scared.’
Mairi, still on the road, now seems to realise what we’re doing. She waves her hands crazily, but doesn’t try and come any closer than she is.
Me and Alex and Duncan say we’re going to try and calm her down, so we begin to walk back. For me it’s really a trick to get further away. I feel mean to be doing it, but I don’t want to stay near that door.
Elizabeth cuts the tape with her big scissors. Then she gives the thumbs-up, and opens it.
We look the other way when the flies start to come.
She’s inside for six minutes. When she comes back out again she kicks the plastic bags off her feet, pulls down her perfume-hanky. She crouches by the door. I think she’s going be sick, then I see that she’s crying.
Calum Ian tries to encourage her. But it isn’t easy because Elizabeth is bent down too much, so in the end he kneels beside her, puts a hand on her neck.
We creep nearer. Elizabeth has stopped crying. I didn’t like the sound of it and I’m glad she’s stopped.
She hands over a yellow bag. Calum Ian rips open the top of it. Inside – his dad’s wallet, keys, phone. There’s also a note, which Elizabeth says was pinned to the outside of a bag which contained his jacket and shoes.
We gather in close to read:
Roderick MacNeil 23/05/70 – 9/12. Wife Mary Anne MacNeil 3/08/72. Deps: Calum Ian, Duncan, Flora. Children? at crisis accom. Mother deceased 5/12, school mort. NOK?
We read the note, then read it again, until the words lose their sense, turn strange.
After this Duncan just goes back to sitting on the step. Calum Ian folds the letter up, smaller and smaller until he can’t fold it any more.
We wait for him to tell us it’s bad, or sad. But he doesn’t. He’s trying to work his mouth to say something: then instead of that he kicks the metal railings leading up to the door: over and over again.
Then he sits down – but not by bending his knees, more by forgetting how to keep the strength in them.
His dad’s phone has a cracked screen. The wallet has fifteen pounds plus plastic cards in it.
Duncan lays out all the cards on the step. There’s one with his dad’s picture. He and Calum Ian look at it – even though it’s just small, even though the colours in it went to grey.
‘This could be your mum and dad’s fault.’
Calum Ian is saying this – to Elizabeth.
He continues: ‘Dad tried – every night, every day to get through to that hospital. Because Flora was sick. She was the first out of our family to get sick. We didn’t know what to do, she wouldn’t wake up that morning. Not even when we put her in the bath. He tried and tried phoning, but nobody ever answered.’
Elizabeth doesn’t look ready to talk. But she does anyway when she says, ‘I never even saw mine.’
‘Flora couldn’t get help when she needed it. You under stand?’
‘And I never saw my parents. Not for the whole of the last week. I never saw them, except for once, when Dad talked to me from the other side of a door. At least you saw your mum. At least you had your mum.’
It sounds like an argument where both people win – or at least, agree not to lose.
Alex shifts along, bit by bit, until he’s sitting between the MacNeil brothers.
He says, ‘Your dad was a hero. He was going to bring us all medicines.’
He rummages inside his backpack and takes out some lemon biscuits. No one wants any, they’re too soft.
‘Everyone has their weakness,’ Alex says. ‘My weakness is bad men. Zombies. Also, having diabetes. Yours is finding your dad not alive. Only it’s not your fault it came true. It’s not your fault, or anybody else’s.’
‘Get lost, Bonus Features.’ Calum Ian points to the hill, to the sea. ‘Go on, get away from me.’
Alex zips up his bag.
‘It was just a thing I thought could help.’
I get uneasy. I want to help Duncan, and Calum Ian, but all the same I don’t. I want to tell Calum Ian to be kinder to Alex, but it isn’t always easy to make someone be a good listener, especially if they’re sad.
He lies on the paving stone, without using his jacket for softness. To be a help I lie facing him and say: ‘Sorry your dad died.’
Calum Ian blinks as if to mean: Heard you.
‘You know how you said about your dad coming to find you? Just before? Well, when my mum stops hiding, she can come and look after all of us. All right?’
Calum Ian doesn’t blink.
‘She’s got lots of sayings. She’s wise for that kind of thing. Here’s one: “Concentrate and the world is yours.” It works for lots of other choices – like Smile, or Laugh. I forgot to ask her how many. She could help us find the other adults. Or help Alex. The whole lot.’
Calum Ian sits up. Tiny stones from the ground have stuck to his cheek. He brushes them off.
‘Gloic. Remember, back in the class, when we talked about facts and opinions?’
