by Rhys Thomas
‘OK.’
He didn’t want to relive it anyway. Of all the things he had seen, nothing had been like that. He had seen so many things in London, but they had all been something born of chaos and panic. It was a natural instinct for people to want to survive. But that was not what the looters had been doing. Burning those innocent people was a pointless act. There was no sense in it. No humanity.
He knew that such people existed but this knowledge did nothing to assuage the feeling of creeping despair in his gut. The supermarket was so close to the house. How long, he wondered, would it be before they found them?
Miriam climbed out of the car but Joseph stayed where he was.
They were bound to come to the house eventually. They would move across the lands swiftly. Not even the army had been able to stop them. Seeing them there, seeing what other human beings could really do to each other was no longer just an idea. It was now a truth. He had seen it. The world had become an immeasurable, monstrous thing, a living entity with a gaping, spluttering maw through which it would suck every last thing. All he wanted to do was protect Miriam and her mother, Edward and Mary. But that could not happen. He would never be able to do it because the animals in the supermarket would always be willing to go further.
Miriam had once said that invisible markers placed human beings higher than the other animals, but he had never believed her until he had been unable to kill Crowder. Something had stopped him, something indefinable, and its presence had been like gravity: an unbreakable law. He was incapable of taking another life. As long as that indefinable thing was still in him, whatever it was, he could not pull the trigger.
His father’s letter was still in his pocket. He read it again and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.
‘We’re fucked,’ he whispered.
Infinity swelled around him. He felt it, and understood it. He stayed in the car for the rest of the day and nobody came for him. He drifted in and out of sleep. At midnight he went out to the cliff edge. There was nothing out there except the darkness. The waves struck the cliffs as they always had; that elusive rhythm you could never quite guess.
He tried to rationalize his thoughts: if I were to die tomorrow is everything in place? Would they be safe?
There was a panting at his side. He reached down and stroked his dog’s head. Pele’s tongue lolled out over the edge of his teeth. They stood there for nearly an hour, the two of them, staring out into the dark of the world as it breathed and turned all around them.
Miriam woke with a start. She had been nightmaring about Henry again. The nightmares were happening more regularly now. Always the same. She was walking through a library in silence, past row upon row of books. Henry would scream behind her and when she turned the library would become a beach beneath a deep red sky. A huge beast, a leviathan, would rise up from the waves and take Henry in its jaws before dragging him into the black sea. Miriam would run towards him and pause at the top of the beach. Burning bodies of killer whales were lined all the way along the sand. As she watched the carcasses burn, the sand on the beach would ignite and firestorm from one end to the other. And then she would wake up, gasping for air.
She tried the light switch. Nothing. Still no power. It had been nearly two weeks now; two weeks since they lost energy, since the man had visited the house, since Joseph had followed him out along the road.
Joseph had hardened since then. He was unapologetic. It was almost as if he was glad of what he had done. Since that day he had kept to himself, leaving the house with Pele in the days and disappearing for hours until nightfall, when he would return, eat alone and go to bed.
She threw some cold water on her face and went downstairs. Mary was in the living room with her grandmother. Miriam stood in the doorway.
‘Where’s Edward?’ she asked.
‘And good morning to you.’
Miriam’s head ached. Her mind could not focus properly. The burning bodies ran across the plains of her mind.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘He went down to the beach with Joseph.’
‘You let him go? Just the two of them?’
Her mother squinted. ‘What’s wrong, Miri?’
She didn’t want Edward being poisoned by Joseph. She opened the front door and went out into the garden. And then she heard it. The crack of gunfire. It reverberated around the cliffs like a great thunderclap. The wind flapped her nightdress against her body. Her bare feet hurt as she ran across the road and picked her way along the line of the cliff, into the shallow spur to the path leading down to the beach.
Fear grew with every step, with every dart of pain that shot up her shins. Huge green ferns grew either side of the path. She had to climb on to the wooden fence to see over them and down to the beach. There were two tiny figures right at the far end, way past the skeletal remains of the fishing boat halfway along, up near the cliffs and the lighthouse.
The sand was difficult to run on. Her throat was raw dry, its flesh retracting, its pores closing. She could make them out, her son and Joseph. He was holding the shotgun up and looking at Edward. He said something to him and fired out to sea. Joseph looked up the beach and saw her coming. Quickly he handed the gun to Edward. She watched in horror as Edward cocked the gun open expertly, leaning the butt in the sand. He placed the cartridges into the loading chamber.
She screamed to him to stop but her voice reached them only as a whisper. Joseph placed his hand on Edward’s back and pointed out to sea. The chaotic crash of the air exploding in the bullet’s prow pushed Edward’s small body backwards. He stuck out a leg for support and did not fall. Joseph ruffled the boy’s hair in approval.
Miriam watched as her little boy raised his head to look at his uncle in the same way that she had seen him look at Henry. The roar of the gunfire echoed off the cliffs all around her, its noise total.
‘What are you doing?’ she screamed.
She pushed Joseph in the chest. That same unreadable face stared back at her.
‘All these months and you’ve learned nothing.’ She tried to keep her voice steady. She did not want him to see how close to crying she was. ‘You’re the same person you’ve always been. You haven’t changed at all.’
She pushed him again, unable to control herself.
Joseph hunched his shoulders.
‘What are you doing? Teaching my son like this. I told you I didn’t want you doing this.’
She grabbed Edward by his hand and marched him back across the beach. She could hardly breathe she was so angry. She turned back to Joseph. His head was lowered and he was staring at his feet.
‘If I had anywhere else to go I’d take the kids and leave you here on your own.’
Her feelings were so exposed that she could no longer control them. She felt Edward’s hand in hers. She was squeezing it too tightly. Releasing her grip she looked down at him and hardly recognized the face staring back.
‘Miriam.’
She looked back at Joseph. He was standing side on to her, his head turned in her direction. He looked at her for several seconds, seemingly considering something that needed to be said, then turned away.
Full summer had bloomed, the vegetable patch they had cultivated in the back garden yielded plentiful supplies and life settled into a laconic routine. The water did not run from the taps, the electricity did not return, and the lack of electricity meant no more television reports, no more telephones, no knowledge of a wider world existing beyond the perimeters of their own little subsistence. The radio still worked but there were no more broadcasts.
In that month they had received no visitors and it felt like time was skipping forward, guiding the world to its new state. Nobody came along the single track road in search of anything and Miriam wondered how many people were left alive, and whether or not the illness that had killed Henry was still claiming victims, or whether the greedy monster in his dark cave was at last sated by its bounty.
Joseph had become even more withdraw
n. He would still work, tilling the garden, fixing things around the house. He would go out hunting and sometimes take the van in the direction of the village in search of things that might be useful.
Beyond the back garden, in the field behind the house, he had erected a series of animal paddocks to house livestock. He had pinned wire fencing to thick, heavy fence posts that he had found on one of his trips in the van. When asked, for he never volunteered information, he said there were many farms in the area and he hoped to find some chickens or some pigs, though since then he had been on several foraging excursions and returned each time empty-handed.
Miriam had watched him from the back bedroom. The way he worked was nothing like the way Henry had worked. Henry had always been a messy person; he didn’t plan far ahead, was a regular taker of breaks and he tended to throw himself thoughtlessly into projects around the house. Joseph was the opposite. He measured each of the quadrants, pinned lines of string in place with wooden stakes that delineated where the wire fencing would go and then he dug small square holes, one by one, without taking a single break, into which fitted the sturdy fence posts with an impressive degree of snugness. He worked slowly but methodically, his mind clear and focused. The whole process took three days and was conducted in a week of fine weather when the first of the summer hazes came.
One thing that Miriam had noticed was that the sky during dawn and dusk became startlingly beautiful. At break or end of day it would redden at the edges and purple overhead in such a way that it seemed as if the contrast and brightness controls of the air had been adjusted. The colours of the sky were crisp and clear and Miriam could not remember whether or not sunsets had always been that way or whether it was the lack of other stimuli that produced a delusional effect.
Her mother thought the children should somehow continue their schooling. They decided on the simple idea of reading for an hour each morning and then discussing what they’d read afterwards. Henry’s father had a good collection of books but most of them were beyond Edward and Mary’s range. The book they settled on was The Once and Future King, it being the only work remotely resembling a children’s book. The children would take it in turns to read a page and a slow pace was set, but after a few days there was a definite improvement.
Joseph showed no interest in the children’s education but one morning Miriam noticed that the copy of the book had mysteriously moved from one side of the breakfast counter to the other. Each night she would note where she left the book and each morning it had been returned to a different point, noticeable only because she had marked its original position. Joseph was reading the book at night when everybody had gone to bed, and not telling anyone.
And there were other things that slowly helped her internal workings crank towards forgiveness. His walks with Pele had continued and at first Miriam had thought it irresponsible of him because if somebody dangerous had come to the house then the family would be without Joseph’s protection. But one afternoon she had taken the binoculars to watch the birds in the fields behind the house when she noticed a flash of colour in the trees. She focused the lenses and saw Joseph sitting between two tree trunks far in the distance, smoking a cigarette with one hand and ruffling Pele’s ear with the other. She had checked again the next day and, just as the day before, he was sitting in the same spot with his old, black dog faithfully at his side, keeping his unseen vigil.
She wanted to say something to him, but not yet. Her father had once told her, a year before he died, that it doesn’t matter how a man treats his loved ones because loving one’s family is easy; it is how he treats strangers and enemies that really counts. She had always considered this good advice, and it had been one of the reasons she had fallen in love with Henry. But Joseph treated strangers with contempt and that contempt had ultimately led him to murder Crowder.
As the weeks passed, the nightmares occurred more regularly, sometimes two or three times in one night. She would watch helplessly from the head of the flaming beach and listen to Henry scream as the monster crushed the life from his body. She would wake with a start, sweating and out of breath. In those desperate moments of the endless night she would force herself to forget her emotions and paddle into the shallow waters where the terror would subside and she would feel the calm of numbness.
Sometimes, when the sun was out and she was working in the garden alone, something would trickle up her back. She would lose herself for a moment and think that things might just work out OK. Despite everything she had seen, the feeling, the will for things to improve, was something very strong and when she felt it, it was as if she was being filled through some secret portal in her centre by a warm, amber, syrupy fluid that smothered the jagged protrusions of fear and made her whole body thrum with a quiet peace. Perhaps it was love, she thought, but then she knew it wasn’t because this thing had more substance than love, was more ubiquitous and less prone to petty fluctuations. This thing was deep and old, consistent and pure, and when it came to her she would take a deep breath, close her eyes and let it tingle along her bloodways to her extremities, then past those into the world itself so that it engulfed and surrounded her as an aura that gave her renewed energy to carry on.
The foundations of the house shuddered in the ground. Ornaments and photographs shuffled across the shelves. She opened her eyes. Darkness and light. It was night but there was a light on the walls, piercing the curtains. She could not tell if she was asleep or awake. Sounds, muffled sounds, crept under the door. Somebody was moving outside. Her head throbbed, spun, tried to rest on something knowable that it could not find.
The light was white; powerful and brilliant, as if the moon had fallen out of the sky into the sea.
She had been shaken in her bed. An earthquake. The land had slipped away and the ocean would come for her. Slowly, the cogs of her mind clicked one by one into the shape of consciousness. She pulled back the curtain and quickly brought her hand up to cover her eyes. There was something in the bay.
She ran to the children’s bedroom. They were asleep and she didn’t wake them. As she went back across the landing she noticed Joseph’s door was open. His bed was made. There was nobody in the room.
Her mother joined Miriam on the landing. The light was so bright that Miriam could see her fragile frame through her thin gown and nightdress.
‘What is it?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know. Where’s Joseph?’
‘I don’t know.’
They heard Pele barking outside. Miriam rushed downstairs and threw open the front door. The light was hanging in the sky offshore: one solitary, powerful star. The grass shone brilliant green in its beams.
Joseph was out on the cliff edge staring into it, his body a black silhouette casting an immense shadow behind it, extending halfway back to the house. A cold wind blew in Miriam’s face and lifted her hair.
The air was silent. She strained to listen for sounds but all she could hear were the distant waves breaking against the cliff. The light did not move. It was not accompanied by a mechanical sound. Tentatively, she took a step towards it.
‘What is it?’
From the cliff top all she could see was the light and the darkness around it. It seemed to fill the whole sky and yet there was still blackness, light and dark melting imperceptibly into one another without a seam.
‘It’s a ship,’ he said.
And then, behind them, was the sound of approaching cars.
In the harsh white light they looked strange, all those people, drifting across the land in their nightwear, all different colours; vibrant, little figures coming towards the light. They had parked their cars near the house and were now walking out slowly on to the grass.
There were lots of them. The unfamiliar sight of so many other people after such a long space of time caused a quickening in Miriam’s head. The people joined Miriam and her mother at the cliff’s edge and together they looked towards the unnatural ball of silent light that hovered above the ocean.
&
nbsp; The water glowed a pale blue as if suffused with phosphorescent organisms. Curling and swirling lines of white surf shifted on its surface. Miriam turned round and looked towards the house, which beamed back at her, the light so bright that it sparkled on the barbed-wire loops that lined the garden wall. The house looked so small and shut off; they had cut themselves off from the rest of the world. There had been people in the village just a few miles away and they had not seen or heard from them and looking at the house it was not difficult see why. It looked like a fortress, threatening and cold with its barbed wire and heavy metal shutters.
The low murmur of voices floated on the wind as the people regained themselves and started to muse over what could have happened. She listened to all the different voices, the different volumes, accents, lilts and tilts of cadence. She had grown afraid of the idea of other people but now, standing on the cliff, those doubts paled in comparison to the warmth she felt. There was no sense of danger between them. The common bond of humanness ran strongly through them. She was so hungry for new connections, to share their grief and fears.
The ship must have been massive, a gigantic body of steel behind that one bright light. It had hit the land with such force that it had shuddered the underlying strata of the coastline, sent a shockwave racing through the solid rock so powerful that Miriam had felt it in her bed. The idea of such power made her feel tiny.
They watched the light for half an hour and soon the little groups of people began to form larger groups as the barriers fell and the natural propensity to communicate became stronger.
Miriam saw the groups merging and felt like a child attending school on the first day. She wanted to speak to them but didn’t know how. She looked at Joseph. He was standing on his own, away to the west, his shadow like a long, dark cape running behind him.
