by Rhys Thomas
Charlie smiled and slowly lifted his hand and started to wave.
‘Hi,’ he said, loudly, so that she could hear. ‘How are you?’
She came into the light and he could see how thin she was. The skin on her face was loose. Charlie felt uneasy. When she was a few feet from the door she stopped.
‘What do you want?’ she said through the glass.
‘Um, my van’s got a flat tyre but I don’t have a jack.’
The woman stepped towards him. From around her neck she took a set of keys and turned one of them in the lock. There was a moment of silence and a pause between them that Charlie had experienced many times before: the wait. The wait to see how somebody would react when a wall of security had been taken down in good faith.
He smiled as widely as he could.
‘I’m not a baddie,’ he said. ‘Honest.’
And he raised his hands up. Miriam’s mother smiled.
‘You’re full of energy, aren’t you?’ she said, opening the door inwards towards her.
Charlie nodded and laughed, the tension diffusing.
‘Sorry, it’s just I’ve been driving for ages and I needed the fresh air.’
‘Where did you come from?’
‘Nowhere really. Well, I’m from Reading but I was in Europe when it all happened.’
The old woman nodded. ‘You’ve had a long journey.’ She was far less scary when she was talking. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Are you with your family?’
‘Nah.’ He paused so that she understood. ‘It’s just me and my girlfriend. She’s out the front.’
The old woman swallowed. Her eyes were two tiny dots in her head.
‘Are you here on your own?’ he said.
He felt the switch in her straight away. She tightened her grip on the door handle and her body moved imperceptibly away from him.
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Please don’t be scared.’
The old woman’s face softened as quickly as it had hardened and the moment passed.
‘I just wanted to make sure you were OK up here,’ he added. ‘You know there’s a camp at the bottom of the hill? That’s where we’re going. It’s supposed to be safe.’
There was a noise in the kitchen behind the old woman.
Charlie looked past her shoulder and through the conservatory but there was nobody in sight. He sensed somebody hiding. He lowered his head conspiratorially.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ he whispered, flicking his eyes past her to the kitchen.
The old woman smiled.
‘You’re a nice boy,’ she said. ‘Go and get your girlfriend and come in for some soup.’
He felt a tingle on the back of his neck. These were the best things to have come out of the mess, these little moments of kindness, of trust.
‘Really?’
‘Are you hungry?’
Charlie laughed. He looked into her eyes, two dark marbles with a square of light in the middle.
‘I’m starving.’
He could never have thought that such a meal would be so welcome. It was just a vegetable mush with some salt and pepper but as he swallowed each mouthful he was sure he could feel the nourishing goodness of it seep into his flesh and bones.
Emily ladled the soup on to her spoon in dainty, ladylike amounts, blew on it and ate. She always said that grace would be the last thing she would let go of, but Charlie was past that. He shovelled the food in as fast as he could.
He looked around at each of the faces at the table: the old woman, her daughter and two little kids. He guessed the husband must have died because there had been no sign or mention of him.
‘So,’ said the old woman, ‘what’s your plan?’
‘We’re going to the camp at the bottom of the hill,’ said Emily. ‘We’ve heard it’s safe.’
‘It seems that way,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s been there for months and we’ve not heard any trouble.’
The younger woman shifted in her seat.
‘Do you know the people?’ Charlie asked.
The old woman considered his question. ‘We don’t have much to do with them.’
‘Don’t you get lonely up here on your own?’ said Charlie, not thinking.
The two women paused as if waiting for the other to answer. It was the younger woman who finally spoke.
‘We think it’s safer to be on our own.’
Charlie nodded and looked into his soup.
The old woman’s daughter had said hardly anything the whole time they had been in there. He knew who she was. She was one of the people who had been broken. He had seen it lots of times.
‘We heard,’ he said, ‘that the government are getting close to a cure.’
Miriam’s mother smiled. ‘You never know.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘We’ve heard similar things from people passing through on their way to the camp.’
Charlie’s voice became animated.
‘We spoke to a guy – didn’t we, Em? – who said they’ve been doing experiments all this time. They haven’t given up. There’s a small group that are working and when this is all over they’ll come back and get things started again.’
The old woman listened to him with patient silence. Charlie took a breath and looked at the little boy and girl.
‘I bet you two are loving not having to go to school,’ he said cheerfully.
The two kids stared blankly back at him.
‘Oh-kay,’ he said, and looked at their mother. ‘Sorry.’
He stopped suddenly when their eyes met. He broke contact and stared into his soup bowl again, not knowing what to say. He had said something wrong. The room became uncomfortably silent. Tears had formed in her eyes.
‘Thanks again for the food.’
The old woman lurched forward and pulled him into a hug. He awkwardly tapped her on the back.
‘You be careful,’ she said.
‘I will be.’
She released him and they looked at each other. He handed her back the car jack they had borrowed to change the tyre and as Charlie let go he wondered what would happen if another tyre went because he didn’t have any spares now.
‘Are you sure you’re OK up here? It’s pretty exposed, and there are some bad people around.’
The old woman tilted her head and smiled.
‘We’re OK,’ her daughter said quickly.
It cut the conversation dead.
Charlie and Emily climbed into the campervan and waved as they pulled away.
Below them wisps of smoke rose into the sky from the camp. In the rear-view mirror, the old woman and her daughter stood side by side in front of the garden gate, watching the campervan, until they shrank behind the hill and were gone from sight.
Two men were sitting in deckchairs on either side of the road. Behind them was a line of tall metal fencing that stretched up the hill and down towards the sea. It was not one unbroken fence, but rather thick steel frames with wire meshing across them, linked together by clasps and held in place by heavy concrete feet. The only gap was the road that ran between it that the men were guarding. The deckchairs were so out of context with their surroundings that Charlie laughed.
‘Guards,’ he said dramatically.
The two men rose and gestured for Charlie to slow down. He rolled down the window and placed his arm over the side.
‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘Any room at the inn?’
The guards looked at each other quizzically.
‘Surely is, my man,’ said the first guard in a gentle northern lilt. ‘Park your van over there.’ He pointed past the open gate to an empty space of tarmac.
‘Sure thing.’
They pulled into the large expanse of the car park. The first half was given over to cars. Behind those were lines of caravans and some other structures that looked like portakabins. People were walking around casually.
‘This is OK,’ Emily said.
He reached over and touched her hair. She leaned in for him and Charlie kissed the top of her head reassuringly. So this was the place they had been told about. They were finally here.
Directly in front of them were three of the portakabins. Long ramps with wooden hand rails led along their front walls towards a door. The door to the middle cabin opened and two men stepped out. They approached the campervan, both pulling their trousers up, one around a particularly substantial girth.
‘Well, he’s not starving,’ Charlie said.
Emily laughed and Charlie jumped down from his seat.
‘Afternoon,’ he said.
The larger man saluted informally. A rim of hair grew around his bald head.
‘You just pitching up?’
He spoke with a broad Scottish accent. His face had friendly, rounded features: a small nose, ruddy complexion, podgy cheeks and little eyes that held in them a subtle, disarming sorrow.
Charlie squinted in the low sun that glowed now as a splattering of yellow light behind the drifting clouds.
‘Yeah. If that’s OK.’
‘You don’t mind a bit of work? You’ll have to pull your weight, comrade.’
Charlie looked down at his skeletal frame. ‘No problem.’
The Scottish man laughed and looked at Charlie’s body.
‘We’ll get some fat on that,’ and he held out a giant hand with thick, chubby fingers. The index finger was missing from the first knuckle up. ‘George McAvennie.’
Charlie’s hand disappeared inside the giant fingers and he felt a powerful squeeze against his bones.
‘My name’s Charlie.’
‘Just Charlie?’
‘Charlie Oldham.’
McAvennie turned to the man at his shoulder, a tall, thin man with a scratchy beard and an old pair of plastic-framed glasses.
‘It’s the bonnie prince himself, eh, Andrew?’ And then he said something so quickly and with such a thick accent that Charlie couldn’t catch it. He just smiled and nodded. McAvennie slapped Charlie on the arm. ‘Have you come far, son?’
‘Kind of. In a roundabout way.’
McAvennie nodded. ‘Who’ve you got with you, kidda?’
He looked back at the van.
‘It’s just me and my girlfriend.’
McAvennie’s friendly face straightened.
‘We won’t allow no funny business here.’
Charlie didn’t know what to say to that, until McAvennie let go of an almighty booming laugh that made Charlie jump. He slapped him on the arm again, this time harder.
‘I’m just shitting you, comrade.’
The tall, thin man next to McAvennie grinned quietly. He had shoulder-length hair but it was thinning and greasy.
‘Just ignore him, kid,’ he said in an American accent.
Charlie laughed, more with relief than anything else.
‘Right,’ he said.
‘OK.’ McAvennie’s voice became businesslike. ‘You go with Mr Andrew Fields here. He’ll show you to your new home.’
Charlie thought he liked the large Scottish man. He had a lot of energy at least – something that had waned in most people.
The American man, Fields, walked towards Charlie’s campervan.
‘You coming?’
The sense of ending struck him; of a journey coming to a conclusion.
He watched in silence as Emily moved along in the seat so that Fields could climb aboard. It’s going to be OK now, Charlie said in his head, and walked quickly over to the van.
He turned the key and the engine rumbled noisily to life. The American shook hands with them both, introduced himself formally and they pulled into the camp.
‘We try to keep all the important things here in the car park. The fields get muddy in the rain, so it makes sense to try and keep the vital things on the blacktop.’
They went down a thin thoroughfare running diagonally through the centre of the car park between lines of cabins, trucks and stacks of what Charlie guessed were supplies covered in light blue tarpaulins.
At the bottom of the car park they came to a small, squat brick building outside which a small queue of people waited. It was the old public toilet building. Next to it was a line of plastic portable toilets and a cabin raised on stilts that Charlie recognized as shower blocks similar to the ones he had seen at the music festivals of the old world.
‘It’s so organized,’ Emily said quietly.
‘We keep on top of it. Makes life easier if we work towards the common goal.’
‘Common goal?’ said Charlie
‘To get through this steaming pile of shit in one piece.’ He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘To survive. Listen, kids, this thing ain’t gonna work if nobody knows what to do.’
The smell of burning wood came in through the open window.
They drove slowly to the corner of the car park. There was an exit at the far end, with two ornate pillars of grey stone standing on either side of the road that led back up a slope to the lighthouse on the point. Branching off the main road a hundred yards along was a mud track cutting a line between two large encampments. Charlie’s van rolled slowly on to it and up. On the left was a city of tents. There must have been hundreds of them, erected all across the grassland up the gentle slope, their colours like a rainbow splashed against the ground.
On the right-hand side were more tents. The hillside was steeper and the tents were arranged in tiers. Lines of washing flapped in the breeze. Behind the tents were further tiers made up of more caravans or campervans that looked out over the campsite like spectators at a firework show.
‘My God, how many people are here?’ said Emily, peering out through the windscreen.
‘With you, one thousand, three hundred and eighty-six.’ He laughed. ‘It’s better to know who’s here and who’s not.’
Charlie was comforted that there was a chain of command at the camp, an order, and that they seemed to know what they were doing. But he knew Emily would not feel the same way.
‘Will we make it up this hill OK?’
The mud looked churned up and sticky.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Fields replied.
His accent didn’t seem as strong when he spoke quietly. Charlie liked it. It wasn’t hard like a New Yorker’s. He was probably around forty years of age but his long hair and patchy beard made him look older than that. Charlie pictured Fields as a boy riding a horse through the mountains of Montana beneath a massive sky, crossing a brook, stopping for a lunch of bread and cheese under an apple tree. The rumble of the engine came back to him as a flock of children ran out into the track and, as one, turned and darted away up the hill.
‘Follow them?’
‘Yup.’
The campervan sank a few inches but held its traction. On the left, the city of domed and peaked tents became more clearly visible. The bases of the tents at the side of the track were rimmed with mud that had splattered up on to the flysheets. Each sat in a circle of brown where trampling feet had killed any grass. Up close things did not look so cosy.
A line of wooden poles, like telegraph poles, lined the left-hand side of the track, sunk into the ground at fifty-yard intervals. Strung along them was an electrical wire dotted with large, round lightbulbs.
As Charlie looked past the lines of tents to the little communal camp areas that had been set up, he saw a young man of about his own age sitting on a log wearing mud-stained boots, strumming a guitar.
‘There’s a future friend,’ he said to Emily. In the rear-view mirror he caught her smile. ‘Yup. Me and him are going to become very good friends,’ he said categorically.
‘You always this cheerful, kid?’
Charlie laughed and gave the answer he always gave: ‘Being any other way isn’t going to change anything, is it?’
Fields pointed off to a narrower, less defined track that curled snake-like between the tents. It wasn’t as muddy as the main track.
‘Through there,’ he said.<
br />
Charlie pulled into the gap. The tyres gained better traction against the more stable grass. They passed a caravan. A woman was sitting on the step in front of the small door, smoking a cigarette and staring blankly at the passing campervan. Painted on the white door was a green lizard with a red stripe running up its back. When Charlie made eye contact with the woman, he instinctively raised his hand. The woman’s face became suddenly animated and she smiled to him, waving back with a roll of her eyes.
‘Can I ask a question?’ said Emily.
‘Sure.’
‘Who are those women living in that house at the top of the hill?’
Fields grunted.
‘Just people.’
‘Don’t they have anything to do with this place?’
‘Not really,’ he said quickly. ‘We wish they would. We could use that house to see . . . you know, certain types of people . . . coming. I guess some people are just selfish. Even now.’
Emily didn’t reply. Charlie changed up a gear as the hill levelled out.
‘Here we go,’ Fields chirped brightly, changing the subject. ‘Home, sweet home.’
They reached the end of a row of caravans. There was a space between the final caravan and the tall wire fence that looped around the camp. Beyond it was a stretch of farmland perhaps a hundred yards across before it turned to forest. The green leaves of the trees were on the turn, paling, starting to lose their lushness. Winter was on its way.
‘I like this camp,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s like a little town, but with tents instead of houses. And mud instead of roads.’
‘Jeez, does this guy ever give you a break?’ Fields said to Emily.
‘He’s mildly autistic,’ she said, deadpan.
Charlie pulled into the space and turned off the engine. There was a stagnant pause. The engine clicked as it cooled. Each of them waited for somebody else to say something.
‘OK,’ said Fields. ‘Listen up. This is how it works: if we’re going to keep this place alive you need to remember the three most important things. One: cleanliness. Do not just throw your food away, do not piss against the fence. Use the bathrooms in the car park. Take your trash to the garbage cans down there as well. Sometimes a truck will come and collect it but don’t rely on it. Two: water. We’ll bring you water. We collect it from the rain, but you should boil it before you use it. You never know what’s in it. And don’t pour it away. If you need to get rid of it, put it in a bucket and take it down to the sea at the far end of the beach. Do you have a bucket?’
