Angel

by Jon Grahame

  Ferguson accepted the logic. Reaper suspected Ferguson also realised that the Scarborough Castle base was unlikely to be productive and that it wouldn’t be long before he moved inland or to one of the fishing-based centres.

  Greta had warned that the future would be bleak from a medical point of view. The cushion of the National Health Service had gone. In future, people would die from illnesses or injuries that, before the pandemic, would have been treatable. Surgical procedures that had been taken for granted, were no longer available. She was not a surgeon, although she would be willing to undertake simple operations and attempt more complicated ones in cases of last resort. At the moment, she had a good stock of drugs and antibiotics but they would eventually pass their lifespan and no more would be available.

  The Rev Nick held non-denominational services on Sundays. He had started by using the dining hall in the manor house but, as the population increased, he moved to the parish church of St Oswald’s in the nearby village of Westfield. Many attended, including a Sikh, two Muslims and three Jews among their multitude of occasional Christians and non-believers. He also officiated at weddings as relationships were gradually formalised.

  As the summer wore on, they reinstated Saturday night socials at the pub to which all were invited. Alcohol was served in moderation and a live group formed around Shaggy, a talented middle-aged singer, guitarist and keyboard player. Reaper had first met the long-haired rock musician in Scarborough, where Shaggy had been working his way through the town’s alcohol and drugs supply. He had also been quietly looking after a quartet of emotionally damaged survivors. Eventually, Shaggy had agreed to move inland.

  ‘Might as well, man. I’ve smoked all the weed.’

  Among the newcomers were a variety of musicians. Two guitarists – one classical, one rock – a trombone player from Black Dykes Brass Band, and a percussionist. They coalesced around Shaggy.

  Autumn came with no vicious surprises and a gentle dip in the temperature and another relationship formed among the Special Forces themselves. English rose Jenny, the former teacher from St Hilda’s Public School, moved in with Tanya. They did not ask the Rev Nick for a service to sanctify their union but he gave them a blessing anyway, one Sunday morning in October, before a packed congregation that gave them a round of applause.

  Tanya told Reaper, ‘Me and Jenny … it’s not because of what happened. It didn’t put me off men. Truth is, I never was attracted to them to start with. This is just natural selection.’

  ‘And you’ve made a great selection,’ Reaper told her.

  Anna teamed up once or twice for patrols with Reaper and she made her interest in him plain.

  ‘It’s not good to be alone, Reaper,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I don’t mean being close to your daughter. Let me, in my North American way, be more explicit. Everybody needs sex.’

  She was so direct that Reaper didn’t see her as a threat to Kate’s memory or his celibacy. He grinned at her.

  ‘Even you, Yank?’

  ‘Particularly me. I’m a West Coast girl. Land of liberation. Shit, I had to buy a bra to burn one.’

  ‘That was before your time.’

  ‘You get my drift. We invented free love.’

  ‘I thought that was the Swedes?’

  ‘No, they invented the duvet.’

  ‘Are you propositioning me?’

  ‘Damn right, I am.’

  ‘I’m very flattered, Anna. But no thank you.’

  ‘To turn me down, you get personal? Before I’m Yank and now I’m Anna? You Brits are so polite.’

  ‘You’re a beautiful young woman, Yank. But let’s keep this professional.’

  ‘Okey doke, Reaper. But you can’t blame a girl for trying.’

  Chapter 6

  HAVEN HAD A WHITE CHRISTMAS. WINTER CAME, snow fell and closed the roads, and they survived. The Rev Nick held services in St Oswald’s church. They ran a generator in the manor house for two days and the community got together for a low-key celebration of survival; with food and drink being supplied from buffets in the dining room of the manor house and at the pub. They played board games. Monopoly was popular because it was played with real money: £20 and £50 notes were stacked for casual use, having been liberated from a bank by Ronnie Ronaldo simply for the fun of it.

  Ronnie was wiry, no taller than five six and had an unhealthy pallor. His hair was thin and slicked straight back and he smoked, constantly – roll-up cigarettes for preference. Even when he was in conversation, his eyes never stayed still, as if checking the background or his peripheral vision for enemies, of which he had had a few in his past life: rent collectors, tally men, police, an ex-wife. He was forty-three but had an ageless quality, as if he had been born old and would stay that way until he died.

  ‘I had a job when I got married,’ he once confessed, as if it was not a fact of which he was particularly proud. ‘But my money went nowhere. It had its hat and coat on as soon as I got paid. I was better off on benefits, the black, the blag, the fiddle and the five-finger discount. I was better off without the wife.’

  He had adapted better than most to the new challenges of a new life, probably because his previous one had been so dysfunctional.

  As well as cash, Ronnie had collected a sizeable hoard of diamond rings, necklaces, jewellery, precious stones, gold and silver, and Kruger Rand. He had handed them over sheepishly to Judith.

  ‘I don’t know why I took them,’ he explained, a little abashed that she might think he had been stealing. ‘I mean, I wasn’t on the rob. But you would, wouldn’t you? Take them? It’s not that they’re worth anything right now, but they might be, in the future, when things get normal. Well, they’ll get a bit more normal, won’t they? Stands to reason. I mean, I thought we could put them away and save them and, maybe sometime in the future, start a bank.’

  Judith had smiled to ease his embarrassment and said, ‘I think that’s a brilliant idea. We’ll call it the Bank of Ron.’

  ‘By heck,’ he said. ‘That sounds grand. Like Rockefeller, you mean? The Bank of Ron.’

  He was delighted and, thereafter, he would frequently return from scouting or scavenging trips with a suitcase or bag filled with jewellery, gold and silver. Judith never asked where it came from and stored it away in the cellar of the manor house for the future.

  For the children, at this festive time, there were showings of How The Grinch Stole Christmas and the animated films The Snowman and Arthur Christmas. For the grown-ups, the old Hollywood classic White Christmas proved a surprise hit, with its Irving Berlin music and nostalgia and the evocative title song. It was shown five times.

  Reaper hadn’t meant to watch it but had stepped into the back of the hall as it started. He stayed to the finish. As he left, Greta Malone joined him. They stopped on the steps of the manor house and watched a fresh fall of snow cover the slush and footprints and restore the beauty of the winter. The pub across the square and the nearby cottages were full. It was open house to mark a tradition as well as a Christian celebration. Greta pulled the collar of her parka up to her ears.

  ‘Cold?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but it’s worth it, isn’t it? For a while you can let the silence settle and forget.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He knew he didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘Where’s Sandra?’ she said.

  ‘She’s looking after the kids. There’s another showing of The Snowman in the library.’

  Greta smiled at him and said, ‘How about buying me a drink?’

  Reaper returned the smile at the notion. No one bought drinks anymore. That time might come again but, at the moment, they were a collective; tins and bottles of beer, wine and spirits were still readily available for free, and few abused the system.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, but
she put a hand on his arm to hold him back, as he was about to walk down the steps.

  ‘Before you do, can I have a word?’

  Reaper stopped. For a rare two hours, he had lost himself in the movie, hoping that the on-screen misunderstandings would be cleared up in time for a happy ending between Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney. Hollywood schtick but it worked. Now he could tell that Greta wanted a serious word, possibly on a personal level, that might in all probability ruin his mood.

  ‘Go on.’

  She sensed his antipathy and smiled to ease his fears. She hooked her arm through his.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s nothing terrible. It’s about Sandra.’

  ‘Sandra?’

  ‘You two are very close, even for father and daughter, which I know you are not.’ Being a doctor, Reaper accepted that Greta would have worked out how unlikely it was that their relationship was not as they wished people to believe. ‘And don’t worry, I haven’t told anybody. Although I suspect one or two have guessed.’

  ‘So?’ For a moment, he had the terrible thought that people might believe he was having an intimate relationship with Sandra. ‘People don’t think …?’

  Greta read the panic in his voice. ‘People think you are two good people. They think you have strong feelings for each other, genuine father-daughter feelings. My point is, that you can be too close. And I don’t for one second mean in a sexual way. The relationship you two have excludes anyone else. That, in the long run, could be unhealthy. You need to give her space to breath, Reaper. Maybe the space to meet someone new, at some time, somewhere, in the future. That’s all I wanted to say. I hope I haven’t offended you. You are two special people. Believe it or not, you have a lot of friends, a lot of admirers. What you and Sandra have is very special, but maybe, just maybe there will come a time, when you should ease away from each other.’

  She squeezed his arm and smiled.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve put this very well, at all. I know you are both still grieving. You will always grieve. The pain may get less over time but you will always grieve. But the two of you together compounds the grief, amplifies it. It makes you strong. After it happened, that grief sent you into dangerous situations, places where you maybe shouldn’t have gone. Risks you shouldn’t have taken. It’ll still happen because you feed off each other’s grief. Do you see what I’m trying to say in my very clumsy way?’

  He actually did, although he didn’t want to acknowledge the fact. They did feed from each other’s grief. Maybe they wallowed in collective suffering. He nodded. ‘I think I do,’ he said.

  ‘I thought maybe you were too close to see, so me and my big mouth took the chance of giving you an outside perspective.’

  ‘A diagnosis.’

  ‘Hardly. But a different viewpoint.’ She leaned forward, so that her head was against his. ‘No one will take the place of Kate. No one will take the place of Jamie for Sandra. But she’s young and she deserves the chance to maybe find somebody else.’ They exchanged a look and he held her gaze. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘How about that drink?’

  He would have preferred to have walked away alone, go over the hill to the guard post, spend an hour contemplating past mistakes, losses and present complications in that wonderful gentle silence brought by snow, but he didn’t. He liked Greta, admired her. If he left abruptly and walked back over the hill, she would be upset at upsetting him. He didn’t want that. It was Christmas, after all. So they went to the Farmer’s Boy for a drink and he saved his contemplation for later.

  The winter was short, spring seemed to start in late February and Haven emerged from its semi-hibernation. A party crossed the Humber again. Sandra and Kev Andrews provided protection for Pete Mack and Ronnie Ronaldo, who made contact with a group ensconced in an oil refinery at Immingham. The people were defensive but open to parley. They had been attacked by others, envious of the fuel they were holding.

  Pete Mack explained that, while the reserve they were protecting might well be worth a great deal eventually, there was little demand at the moment when it was easier to syphon petrol and diesel from garages.

  ‘They were suspicious,’ he reported. ‘But we did a deal as a basis for the future.’

  The group had been living mainly on food salvaged from supermarkets and the sight of the fresh meat and home-grown produce that Pete had taken, as a taster of what they had to offer, proved decisive. They exchanged a van-load of beef, pork and lamb for a tanker containing 34,000 litres of petrol.

  ‘They have a row of trucks in there and tanks containing God know’s how much,’ Pete said. ‘They thought it was a good deal.’

  While still plentiful, fuel was becoming a tricky subject. Each community was eager to preserve the integrity of the garages and fuel stations within their sphere of influence, although these boundaries were never precise. This could, the Haven hierarchy realised, eventually lead to fuel wars. The previous summer, Pete Mack had acquired two 1,000 litre petrol bowsers with electric pumps which they used to drain the tanks of other petrol stations and top up the two garages within their boundaries, in the villages of Westfield and Twin Acres, as well as the diesel tanks at Haven community farms.

  Every official vehicle from Haven had a rotary pump in the boot so that fuel could be obtained direct from a garage forecourt, as well as a length of plastic tubing to syphon it from any abandoned car. They had time yet, but the time was getting less.

  Richard Ferguson, their tame boffin, worked out simple figures. The Special Forces now drove Range Rovers with 3.6 litre diesel engines; all were the same model to make them interchangeable. They were excellent off-road vehicles that did 0-60 in under nine seconds and an average of 25 miles to the gallon and the tank was big enough to take them 580 miles without refueling.

  Those four vehicles, driving an average of 400 miles a week each, would use 3,328 gallons of fuel a year between them. Which meant that a tanker of 34,000 litres – or 7,500 gallons – would last just over two years. Add the scavenger trucks, the farm vehicles and tractors, and the other vehicles the community used, and they could begin to understand that, eventually, it would run out. The timeline was finite.

  The committee took the warning seriously and the fuel held within the community became rationed. It was only available for agricultural purposes, official vehicles and Special Forces. People began to get used to using horse transport and bicycles. They could, of course, continue to use cars, as long as they refilled their tanks by syphoning from abandoned vehicles when they were out.

  A month later, Pete and Ronnie went back and made another trade, this time for a similar amount of diesel. They parked the trucks near their industrial compound of supplies.

  Ferguson wanted to start fitting solar panels. Ronnie Ronaldo located stockpiles of them at Scarborough and Selby, and Ferguson, who soon acquired the nickname of ‘Prof’, organised a team and began to fit them on the manor house. Eventually, he wanted to equip all the cottages and houses in the community with them.

  Reaper tried to lighten his relationship with Sandra. They no longer teamed up every time they went out. She had seen action; some of the others had not. So it made sense for them to partner with the newcomers. It came as a shock when he discovered she had become nineteen on 28th March. She told him on the morning of her birthday in her apartment in the manor house.

  ‘I thought you ought to know,’ she said, ‘seeing as you’re my father,’ and he held her.

  And they both cried.

  The tears came unexpectedly. They came and didn’t stop, as if they had been waiting since Jamie and Kate had been killed, maybe even before then: maybe since the death of his other daughter, Emily.

  They allowed composure to return in its own time and sat together and held hands. They didn’t need words to explain the grief and regrets or the words to explain the anguish they both felt because no one knew he
r birthday. No one had needed to know her birthday or had taken the trouble to discover it. At that moment, Reaper saw the world afresh and wondered why they bothered.

  ‘One thing I want for my birthday,’ she said.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Don’t push me away.’

  ‘I haven’t …’ He saw her face. ‘Was it so obvious?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We were too close.’

  ‘We can never be too close.’

  ‘Claustrophobic. I thought I might be smothering you. You’re a teenager, for chrissake.’

  Sandra started laughing and, like the tears, couldn’t stop.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

  Eventually, she said, ‘Teenager?’ She was still laughing although not as severely. ‘Nightclubs, high heels and a dropped shot in a Crabbie’s Ginger Beer? I’ll get my party frock out and see which band’s on tour. Maybe it will be Madness. Madness would be good.’ The laughter stopped. ‘Madness would be totally appropriate.’

  They sat and stared at each other, the tears drying on their cheeks. She reached out and brushed away the stain on his face.

  ‘We’ll always have each other,’ she said. ‘And bollocks to claustrophobic.’

  ‘I was worried.’

  ‘Don’t be. I loved Jamie, I miss him, but I know I might meet someone else. In the meantime, I’ve got you. Now and forever, whether you like it or not. Dad.’

  Now he laughed, too, and they held each other again and he revised his earlier opinion of the world. It was not such a bad place after all.

  They got another recruit to Special Forces on April 1st. Keira O’Dowd was thirty-two and had arrived with three others a month before. She had a mass of unruly auburn hair, startling blue eyes and a soft Irish accent.

  ‘I hope this isn’t a mistake,’ she said.

  ‘What? Applying to join?’ Reaper said.

  ‘On April Fool’s Day?’

  ‘You don’t look like a fool.’

  ‘I’m not.’