by Rhys Thomas
He said it in such a way that Joseph knew Miriam would take pity. It was so obvious what this man was trying to do.
‘Where are you heading?’ he said coldly.
‘I don’t know. I thought I would decide when I reached the sea.’ He laughed nervously.
His shoulders slumped forwards. The line of his collarbone was prominent below his neck. The skin around it was tight, as if the bone had been shrink-wrapped in skin. His wrists were the same: thin, bony. Beneath his beard his cheeks were sunken. The beard itself was coarse and patchy. There were bald gaps at the chin where he had pulled it out. For a moment Joseph felt sorry for him. The man’s body had wasted away, was wasting away still, and Joseph reminded himself that sympathy was dangerous.
‘Well, you’ve reached the sea,’ Miriam said, with a laugh.
‘Yeah.’
He didn’t add anything. He had nothing else to say. The idea that he was lost was given space to sink into their consciences.
‘Do you have any family?’
Crowder looked at the table and shook his head.
‘No friends?’
‘They all died. My family and my friends,’ he said.
Suddenly the door to the kitchen burst open. There was a shock of energy around the table as the children ran into the room. Edward was chasing Mary. When they saw the stranger, they stopped instantly and their backs straightened.
‘Can you wait outside, kids?’ Joseph said.
‘It’s OK,’ said Miriam.
Joseph looked at her.
‘Come and sit down.’ She glanced at Joseph. ‘This is Mr Crowder.’
The children looked at the man in the filthy clothes but did not move from their spot. They were uneasy with the new presence.
‘We’ll go outside and play,’ said Edward quietly.
He looked at Joseph, who nodded with approval. ‘Good idea,’ he said.
He could sense Miriam’s annoyance but Joseph didn’t care. She shouldn’t try to prove a point by putting her children at risk.
‘You run along,’ he said.
The children left behind them a wake of silence. Joseph’s right foot tapped the floor.
‘So,’ said Miriam, breaking the tension. ‘You’re welcome to use the bathroom if you want. And we’re having vegetable stew for dinner. Is that OK?’
Crowder looked at Miriam and smiled. The skin at the corners of his eyes creased and his eyes flickered to Joseph for an instant and then back to Miriam.
‘Thank you.’
Joseph waited in his bedroom whilst Crowder used the bathroom. He stood at the small window and looked out to the west, the direction from which Crowder had walked to the house. He wondered how he had come that way. Logically he would have come from the east, from the direction of the village. There was nothing to the west – just the unmanned lighthouse and the woods.
He listened to the hiss of the shower coming through the wall and imagined the evening that lay ahead – dinner, awkward conversation, and then what? Joseph would have to tell him to leave. He knew that such a moment would arrive. Inviting him into the house was unfair on the stranger. Miriam had given him false hope. He could not stay with them. That much was certain. Joseph would not allow that. If they let him stay, even for one night, getting rid of him would be more difficult.
He thought about what his father would have done if he was still alive, but didn’t have to think for long. He would have done the same thing as Miriam – unthinking and instinctive.
The mental photograph of his father dying came to him again. It triggered a sudden, deep anger inside him. The memory grew then, for the first time since it had happened. The mental image pulled back and the scene was there in its whole. He had knelt at his father’s side and hooked his arms beneath his back. His bones were light and small. He had sat him up in the street, the sound of gunfire and helicopter blades and screaming all around. There had been no last words, no messages of good will. It was just death. He had just died. His father’s biology had betrayed him and he had died. He was just skin and bones and hair after all. A machine. Approximation to sentience was just that. The magic was gone and all that had been left behind was an atrophying carcass.
The hiss of the shower in the room next door stopped. There was movement, sound, Crowder climbing out of the shower, a towel being drawn from its rail. Joseph looked again through his window at the road that stretched over the hill, out of sight, leading nowhere.
He was still dirty, even after his shower. It was ingrained in his skin. It had become a part of him. He hunched over his bowl of food and slurped it from his spoon.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said between greedy mouthfuls. ‘I haven’t had hot food in days.’
‘When did you leave London?’ asked Joseph in a voice neither friendly nor hostile.
‘I don’t know exactly. Three weeks ago. Four, maybe.’
‘Where were you living?’
‘South. But I was in Highbury when it wiped everyone out. I worked there.’ He stared into his bowl as he spoke. ‘I went back home and stayed in my flat for a week, just watching the TV and looking out of the window. What else was there to do, you know? There were dead bodies in the street under my window. Nobody came to collect them. I barricaded myself in so that the . . . violent . . . ones couldn’t get in.’ His eyes flitted around the room. ‘You should have seen what they were doing.’ The spoon in his hand, which had been moving towards his mouth, stopped. ‘They were ripping the dead to pieces.’
Miriam glanced at Joseph. She directed her eyes towards the kids.
‘You’ll scare the kids,’ he said.
Crowder shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you what happened,’ he said, not listening. He shovelled more food into his mouth. It ran down his chin, through his beard and back into the bowl. ‘You don’t need to hide things from children,’ he said authoritatively.
Edward and Mary, their heads a foot lower than the others’ at the table, sat with their arms at their sides.
Joseph sensed the change in the man; his confidence was growing.
‘I felt like the last man on Earth, you know? Like the old legends. It was weird seeing a whole city disintegrate into shit—’
‘Hey! That’s enough.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘Nobody’s got any hope any more. That’s why we’re all fucked.’
Miriam stood up and went round the table to the children. Crowder carried on, senseless to the frost in the room. Joseph let him speak so Miriam could understand what he had been saying about letting strangers into the house.
‘This thing’s not going away. It’s coming for us all. We’re just waiting for it – don’t pretend you don’t already know this. You know it’s true.’
Miriam whispered to the children and they climbed down from their seats. The three of them left the room. Miriam’s mother dropped her spoon loudly into her bowl before following her daughter and grandchildren. She put her hand on Joseph’s shoulder as she passed behind him in a gesture of power transferral.
Crowder looked at Joseph. His small black eyes gleamed in the light.
‘Why are they burying their heads in the sand?’
He half shouted it, wanting them to hear him.
‘How did you find your way to this house?’
‘I know the village. I used to come here on holidays when I was a kid.’
‘So you thought you’d come here and cause trouble?’
‘I’m not causing trouble.’
Joseph leaned slowly across the table to the man sitting opposite. He placed each of his hands on either side of Crowder’s bowl and slid it gently back across the table towards himself. Crowder’s eyes followed the bowl and continued on up until he and Joseph were staring into each other’s eyes.
‘This is my food now,’ said Joseph.
Crowder’s eyes welled up instantly.
‘Please,’ he said. His body began to shake. He covered his face with his long, skeletal fingers. The sleeves of his dirty sweater slid down his b
one-thin wrist. ‘I’m sorry. Please just let me finish my food. I don’t know what I’m doing any more.’ His voice wavered. ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’
Joseph watched Crowder’s change half in disbelief and half in pity. Somewhere along the line something had broken this man. In just a few months what had once been a normal working, living human being had been reduced to the shadow now sitting before him.
‘Paul,’ he said.
Crowder’s shoulders jerked as he sobbed. Wherever he had been, whatever things he had witnessed, had caught up with him. Perhaps the house itself was the final push; in it he would have seen the very things that he would never, ever have, and so the enormity of his own hopelessness. He cried uncontrollably – a mass of energy in flux, moving from stored state to spent.
‘Paul,’ said Joseph again.
But he wasn’t listening. Joseph pushed the food back across the table. The steam from it rose into the knot of Crowder’s arms and face. The heaves slowed and lessened, like a breeze moving away from a swaying tree. At last he stopped. He took his arms away from his head. His face was red, his cheeks soaked. The hairs on his beard glistened like beetle skin.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I’ll leave.’
‘You can finish your food.’
The kitchen door eased open and Miriam came back into the room. She stood at Joseph’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Crowder, again. ‘I don’t know why I was being like that.’
Joseph watched his movements. Only a few threads of sanity were holding this man from chaos.
‘We just want to help,’ she said. ‘Give you a meal, let you wash, you know.’
‘I know.’ He shovelled a spoonful of stew into his mouth and swallowed loudly. And then he said, seemingly to himself, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
The darkness was growing in the room as the day ended.
‘They’re saying the illness is taking people’s hope,’ said Crowder, quietly. ‘Have you heard that? That’s what they’re saying. But it’s stretching further than that.’ He dried his cheeks with his muddy sleeves, smudging two grimy marks on the skin. ‘So many people losing hope is contagious. I can feel it leaving me even though I’m not ill. You take it away and you start to realize just how powerful despair is.’
He looked at Miriam and Joseph with a quick, knowing smile. As soon as it had left him, Joseph felt his weird confidence return. He had to get rid of this man. He felt sorry for him but he was unstable. His mental state was too precarious to risk having around the family.
Miriam took a seat next to Joseph. She seemed calm. She pulled Mary’s bowl over and took a spoonful of food.
‘Where will you go?’
‘I won’t bother you.’
‘You can’t stay here, Paul,’ said Joseph immediately. ‘I don’t want you to think you can. You will have to leave.’
Crowder breathed out a large bulk of air, as if he had just been punched in the stomach.
‘I won’t be any trouble,’ he pleaded. ‘I can help out.’
‘It’s not going to happen.’
‘You said things will get back to normal.’ Crowder addressed Miriam. ‘Can’t I stay here until then?’
‘Paul,’ said Joseph sternly. ‘You’re being pathetic.’
Crowder raised his voice suddenly. ‘I’m just trying to survive, for God’s sake.’
Miriam sat up in her chair.
‘No room at the inn,’ he said loudly, his head nodding in understanding. ‘Is that it?’
Joseph needed to stop this before Miriam said something stupid. ‘That is it, yes. There is no room.’
It was hard to believe that the first man they let into the house was so manipulative. But maybe that was to be expected. You’d need to be like that to survive and, that being the case, Joseph thought about just what other attributes this man might have. The thought made him uneasy.
‘Perhaps we could take you somewhere,’ said Miriam. ‘We have a car.’
Crowder stared at the table like a child. ‘Everyone I know is dead.’ He said it flatly but the statement rang out clear. ‘I’m alone.’
‘There are camps though.’
Crowder looked up from the table. ‘The camps? They’re even worse. I went to the one outside Reading – that’s the first place I tried.’
Crowder noticed Joseph’s attention spike and turned his chest to face him.
‘It had been there a fortnight but by the time I got there it was all over. They’re not safe havens. They’re fine if the army are there to protect you, but these places are massive and they can’t be everywhere at once.’ He looked down at the table again and put his hands loosely together. ‘You know, when there are no laws, people do’ – he looked up at them and smiled wanly – ‘pretty much whatever they want. When I got there, I saw . . .’ He trailed off, waited and started again. ‘What I’ve learned is that when the world was normal we had all these things to try and make people equal, but take them away and it doesn’t take long for the old ways to come back.’
Miriam leaned forward. ‘But the news reports—’
‘Show you what the army let them show you.’
‘Why? I mean, what’s the point in that?’
Crowder shrugged. ‘People are liars. The army don’t care about the truth. They just want people to think they’re in control and as long as the news reports show things are going well, they keep their power, right? As long as they are powerful in the minds of the people, they are powerful.’
‘So how long were you there for?’
‘A day. That’s all I needed to see how things were there. But there were more problems than just the gangs; far more. Lots of people were ill. Not with the Sadness, just physically ill. There wasn’t enough clean water, not enough food.’ He paused. ‘Anyway,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t want to go to another camp.’
Miriam said nothing. Joseph could feel her thoughts, feel the loosening towards Crowder.
‘Maybe we can let you stay for one night,’ she said.
His chest deflated. It had happened. He turned his head round to her. ‘No,’ he said.
‘It’s just one night, Joseph.’
He stood up from his chair. ‘Can I have a word with you outside?’
She held his stare as she rose, and walked out through the kitchen door.
‘What are you doing?’
He spoke quietly so his voice wouldn’t travel past the closed door.
‘You agreed that we try things my way.’
‘You heard him earlier on, you saw the way he was with the kids. Forget whether he’s good or bad, Miri, he’s just not stable. That’s the truth. He could do anything in his state.’
‘He’s lost his family and friends, Joseph. How do you think he should be behaving?’
Joseph sighed. ‘I feel sorry for him, I really do, but he is going to be a problem.’
‘Stop being so dramatic about everything. He needs love—’
‘Oh please,’ he scoffed. ‘Miri, I know you want to help him, but going about it like this isn’t the right way. If we let him stay, even for one night, we’re giving him false hope.’
‘He needs to get back on his feet, that’s all. Then he can think about what he’s going to do next.’
‘Which will be to stay here. That’s what he wants, and it’s not going to happen. Look, the way you think; you don’t look at things in the long term. Everything you do seems to be on some bizarre impulse—’
‘Not true.’
‘It is true. You think everything can be solved with quick fixes. You think that if we let him stay one night he’ll get up in the morning all fresh as a daisy and ready to pack up his things and move on. It’s retarded.’
‘Thank you, Joseph.’ She stared at him coldly.
‘Well it is.’ He shrugged. ‘What if we let him stay? You’re committing yourself to something you cannot deliver on. He’ll see it for more than it is, whether you believe it or not
. He’ll want to stay.’
‘It’s just one night.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t be sarcastic, Joseph.’ The pitch of her voice was higher. ‘We have to do this. I have to do this. I believe it’s the right thing to do.’
‘What do you mean, “believe”?’
‘Christ, Joseph. You don’t have to have faith to know that helping people is the right thing to do.’
He ran his hand through his hair and leaned against the doorframe.
‘This is crazy.’ He took a deep breath and lifted his face to the ceiling. Finally composing himself, he said, ‘Do you have any idea how annoying you are?’
Miriam smiled. ‘It’s just one night.’
They looked at one another. He suddenly wanted to kiss her. He tried pulling his thoughts away from the impulse. He hated himself for the thought even creating itself in his mind. He didn’t even know what the feeling was.
She put her hand on his arm and squeezed. And then she stood on tiptoes and leaned in towards him. Her scent was warm and sweet. It had been so long since he had smelt perfume that it triggered a surprising and powerful base reaction in him. She moved her head to the side of his and kissed his cheek.
He remembered picking cherries with the children in the walled garden of the deserted house again, and lying on the grass with the sun on their backs, him teaching her how to shoot. As she went past him, back into the kitchen, he thought about grabbing her arm and stopping her. But he didn’t. He let her go.
It was dark outside. Joseph walked around the house with one of the torches. He wanted to be sure that Crowder had not brought anybody else with him. The air rifle was strapped over his shoulder. The surreal prospect entered his head of one day using a gun against another human being.
He thought back to when he was a young man, an ideological post-grad at the university. He and his friends often asked rhetorically, who has the right to take another human life? The idea was abhorrent. Where had that ideology gone now? Perspectives change like tides over the course of a life. Ideologies shrink when life tells them to. None of his friends, not even the ones with all that verve in them, all that piss and vinegar, had changed the world. Everything was just the same as it always had been.
