On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  Charlie was waking up early. The cold made his leg ache. The wound had recovered well for the first week; there had been no infection and when the pain came, as it did at times, it was easily bearable. But now the aching was worse and he was still unable to put normal pressure on it. When he walked without his crutch it was with a limp, and the limp was becoming more pronounced.

  A recent salvage had brought back rolls of plastic, formed into grids that could be laid down as walkways. There were several areas of pathway that had become almost impassable with mud. The work the men were doing was exhausting and dirty. But it was good work. The pathways were welcomed.

  They were working near the top of the hill, near Charlie’s campervan. At the far end of the village of tents was the structure of the school that was being built. It was almost finished. Charlie watched a man straddle the roof and hammer tacks into the roofing material.

  Fields came and stood next to him.

  ‘You OK, Charlie?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t seem it.’

  The man on the roof of the school building shimmied along it. Charlie watched vacantly as he reached into a cloth sack tied to his belt, pulled out a tack and hammered it into the roof. He was so far away that the sound of the hammer blow was inaudible.

  ‘You don’t seem yourself.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘You can’t let things consume you, man,’ said Fields.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘When you came here you were full of beans. You need to get it back. Get your mojo back.’

  Charlie sniffed.

  ‘Wanna talk about it?’

  ‘I’m fine, honestly. I’m just tired.’

  The man down below shimmied across the apex of the school roof again and started hammering. When he did it reminded Charlie of the man on the roof in the hamlet; his head snapping back violently, a tiny black stain against white sky, there and then gone. The sound of slapping footsteps echoed up the hill and one of the little kids came running towards them. He had a mop of blond hair that he had to brush out of his eyes.

  ‘Mr Fields, Mr Fields,’ he said, breathlessly.

  Fields and Charlie stared at the child.

  ‘My dad said to fetch you,’ he managed to pant. ‘Can you come down?’

  They followed the boy down the slope and into the middle of the tented village. Charlie had never been in between the tents before. Only when you were in amongst them did it become clear just how many there were. There was just a foot or two of space between one flysheet and the next. The guy ropes criss-crossed like spider webs, making it impossible to navigate a path through without stepping over them. The place was a mud bath near the centre. Charlie realized just how easy he and Emily had it living up near the top of the camp.

  Somewhere behind the canvas walls of the tents he could hear raised voices. Two men were arguing. One of them was holding a bucket. He was short and squat with a red face.

  ‘You did, I saw you do it,’ said the other man, who was taller with thin blond hair and glasses.

  ‘Why have you got to be such a dick about it?’ said the squat man.

  Fields strode up to them. ‘Oh-kay, what’s going on here?’

  The man with the bucket turned to him. ‘You stay out of this, Yankee.’

  ‘He was pouring his piss away,’ said the blond man.

  The squat man raised his face to the sky in exasperation. ‘So what?’ he said, impatiently. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘It’s the rules.’

  ‘Yeah? Whose rules, Benjamin? Not mine.’

  Fields spoke. ‘You can leave if you don’t like the rules.’

  The man snapped his head around. ‘I told you to stay out of this.’ He seemed more agitated than he should have been. There was a volatility that Charlie could sense was about to overflow. ‘So I poured it away, big deal.’

  ‘It is a big deal,’ Fields replied calmly.

  But Fields’s calm only served to heighten the squat man’s agitation. He looked at Fields, and Charlie thought for a moment he was about to lash out.

  ‘It’s not even that far to the toilet,’ said the blond man.

  The squat man shook his head and then, slowly, dropped the bucket and put his hands over his face. The moment froze.

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Fine.’

  He picked up his bucket and walked away from the group, round to the front of the tent. Charlie heard him rummaging inside. They went round to the front and Fields looked inside.

  ‘Come on, man, don’t do this.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  Charlie noticed that the little blond kid who had fetched them was standing in the near distance, watching the scene.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Fields.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  Fields turned to Charlie and the blond man. ‘He’s packing up.’

  The blond man snorted. ‘Good riddance,’ he said, loud enough for the man inside the tent to hear. ‘As if we haven’t got enough problems here already.’

  Fields sighed.

  Charlie looked at the blond man. He had bad skin and watery blue eyes. The squat man had been in the wrong but Charlie found himself siding with him. The way his body had relaxed when he had dropped his bucket spoke loudly to him.

  He emerged from the tent flustered and out of breath. He had packed his things into a large suitcase with an extendable handle that was clearly never intended for a camping holiday and when Charlie saw it he caught a glimpse of the man’s past life. In that one out-of-place object he saw how much the man had lost, how much everybody had lost.

  The blond man watched him impassively, arms folded, as he went about disassembling his tent.

  ‘Please stop,’ Fields pleaded, his shoulders hunched. ‘Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Charlie could not stay quiet any more. ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘It’s OK, mate,’ he said, his eyes flicking to him. Everybody knew he was the kid who had been shot in the leg. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Why don’t you just pitch up somewhere else? Somewhere away from him?’ Charlie said. He felt emboldened by the way the blond man was behaving. ‘Wouldn’t that be better than just leaving?’

  But the squat man was stubborn and could not be persuaded. He packed his tent and rolled it up.

  ‘You can’t last out there,’ said Fields, finally.

  ‘I can’t last in here, either,’ he said. ‘I’m fed up with it. I’m fed up of living like this, getting covered in shit every day. It’s no way to live.’

  ‘Life is harder out there,’ said Fields, pointing.

  ‘I’m sorry for calling you a Yankee,’ said the man.

  Fields laughed. ‘Believe me, buddy, I’ve been called a lot worse. Come on. Don’t go.’

  He shook his head. ‘I have to.’ He went to leave.

  Charlie stepped in front of him. ‘Wait,’ he said. He put his two arms out and placed them on the man’s shoulders. ‘Please don’t do this.’ The man’s eyes were dark green and they stared at him without the emotion Charlie had expected to see. ‘You don’t know what’s out there,’ he said quickly, his mind flushing hot. ‘The raiders that are out there . . .’

  ‘Kid, I’m not scared any more.’

  He went to step around Charlie, but Charlie moved to block him.

  ‘They won’t just kill you,’ he said.

  The deep green eyes flickered. Charlie thought about all the things the man in front of him had seen during the course of his life, and how nobody would ever know about them because if he left he would fade into history like he had never been there. Nobody would remember him. The darkness shunted forward.

  ‘Let him go,’ said the blond man, uncaringly.

  ‘Shut up,’ Charlie said, losing himself. His brain was losing its grip.

  ‘We all stick to the rules,’ the blond man continued, ‘because we know
it’s the right thing to do.’

  The squat man brushed Charlie’s hands off his shoulders. ‘Ben’s right, mate,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not.’ Charlie’s voice had faded to a whisper.

  ‘Charlie.’ Fields’s tone was filled with kindness. ‘If he wants to leave he can leave.’

  ‘But you’ll die,’ he whispered.

  He was fully aware now that everybody there was looking at him.

  The squat man smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  How could it not matter? Charlie could not understand it.

  The blond man put his hands in his pockets. Charlie looked at Fields, and the tall American nodded to him. He lowered his head and stepped aside for the squat man to pass, and as he wheeled his suitcase through the mud along the only path with no guy ropes Charlie heard him say, ‘Take care, Charlie,’ before he disappeared.

  The three remaining men stood there for a moment until, at last, the blond man said, ‘Well it’s good riddance as far as I’m concerned. He was always going to be trouble.’

  They found the Christmas decorations in the attic of the house and had trimmed up as usual. The decorations were dated and reminded Miriam of how Christmas had been when she was a child. But there was no tree. Henry’s father had always used a real tree and the decorations they hung about the house seemed without substance with no focal point.

  Edward had got into trouble a few days ago when he had gone into the woods behind the house and returned with carrier bags filled with holly sprigs. The holly now adorned the tops of the picture frames around the house.

  The baby was getting heavier. Her back hurt and she found herself getting tired easily. She had to sit down to put on her shoes. That was something she had forgotten. Sometimes she could feel bony protrusions pushing against her stomach, rolling along underneath its surface as the baby moved. She needed more food than she ate but there was none available. The vegetable patch yielded little in the winter and the stores of tinned food in the cellar were almost gone.

  Miriam and her mother had rationed the food they had left to last until the end of January. They would have liked to ration it further because winter would not be over by then but it was impossible. There was hardly enough as it was. When she was having Edward and Mary she had gained weight. But not this time. The baby was taking too much of the food for itself and leaving Miriam hungry.

  It was not until Christmas Eve that Mary first mentioned presents. When she asked she did so in a guilty way, as if she knew it was not right but she couldn’t resist.

  ‘Things are going to be a little different this year,’ Miriam told her daughter.

  Mary’s large, round eyes surveyed her mother.

  ‘Christmas is not always about presents,’ she went on. ‘It’s about being with your family – with me, and Gran, and Edward.’ The words were not going to be enough, Miriam could tell.

  The shifting lines on her daughter’s face described her disappointment.

  ‘Is Father Christmas OK?’

  Miriam smiled inwardly. If Mary were not eight years old she would have thought the question was phrased in such a way that it would force a concession from her.

  ‘He’s OK, but he might be stuck at the North Pole this year.’

  ‘So he’s not dead?’

  Miriam brushed Mary’s hair away from her face. ‘No,’ she said.

  That evening they sat on the floor around the coffee table in the living room and had a large open fire as a special treat. They had made a loaf of bread, which they toasted with the toasting fork over the hot flames.

  ‘This is how people would spend Christmas in the olden days,’ their grandmother told the children.

  They took the board games out of the airing cupboard and played until past midnight. The excitement of Christmas kept the children wide awake and Miriam let them stay up. The fire was warm and it soothed her body. She was tired but the children’s enthusiasm was infectious enough to keep her awake.

  They went to bed at just after one o’clock in the morning. Miriam sat down on the edge of her bed and hoisted her feet up. She pulled the blanket over her, right up to her neck, and fell asleep instantly.

  When she awoke, it was to the smiling faces of her whispering children. They wanted to go downstairs. The old custom in London had been for them to wait in their bedrooms until they were told it was OK to go downstairs, where their presents would lie, underneath the tree and hung in stockings above the fireplace, and though the setting had changed they had not broken with tradition.

  When she threw the blankets off the dull pain of cold settled over her skin.

  ‘But you know that Father Christmas couldn’t come, don’t you?’ she said, addressing Mary.

  Edward stepped in. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  They went downstairs and into the kitchen. There had been a frost again. The sky was filled with a thin grey mist leading up into a thick white soup of cloud. The whole world was without colour.

  Mary ran out to the living room and returned a few minutes later, looking despondent. Miriam thought of how if Henry had still been alive he would have done something for the kids. He would have made sure of it. She thought she might start crying and so she stood up from the table and went to the front door for air. She pulled it open and looked out at the big grey sea. The tide was in and the swell was high. And then her eyes were drawn to the front step and her breath faltered.

  On the ground was a cloth sack the size of an old dustbin bag. It had not been tied at the top and she could see that the sack was stuffed full of wrapped presents. She looked around to see if there was anybody near, but the road running past the house was empty. She was crying now. She went to call the kids but her voice failed her. She looked down towards the camp, at all the little tents popping up out of the hillside, and thought of the people inside them, and then stared back down at the sack of presents.

  The new year came. It rained on the first day and on the second day the rain in the road turned to ice. In the camp, the slippery mud in the pathways between the tents became hard and irregular. McAvennie had told Charlie that in the time between Christmas Day and new year, seventeen people had died. Sixteen of the illness. One had died of exposure; an old man who had been found in his tent. He had lived on his own since his wife had succumbed to the illness. His body had frozen into a solid block.

  The cold snap made Charlie’s leg hurt. Despite the pain he continued helping Fields and the other men with the laying of the plastic walkways. Christmas had come and gone and the depth of winter thickened all around them. And still there was no sign of the raiders who had attacked the farmhouse.

  Charlie looked, as he so often did when he was standing around watching the men work, down to the camp. The bright colours of the tents were fading as layers of dust and mud slowly settled on them. The progress of the school building was slow. He couldn’t see any difference in it from one day to the next.

  He turned back to the workers. One of the men, who had been shovelling out a muddy pool, threw down his spade and put his hands on his knees.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said.

  Charlie was standing further down the hill on his own, holding some of the long metal stakes used to pin the tracks to the ground. He looked at the man.

  ‘I can’t do this any more,’ he said.

  Fields limped over to him and put his hand on his back. He was talking to him quietly, out of Charlie’s earshot. The man shook his head. Charlie turned away.

  Further down the hill he caught a glimpse of something passing between a gap in the tents. His eyes followed the direction of the movement. A man emerged. Charlie recognized him immediately. It was the man with the forked tongue. He was wearing a pair of old, ill-fitting trousers and a tattered shirt. He looked different in the daylight. He looked more human, but there was still something overtly dangerous in him; in the way he moved, swaggered. His body was long and thin and fluid.

  Charlie looked back up the hill towards Fields
. He was still talking to the man who had thrown his shovel down, and when he turned back his chest tightened. The man with the forked tongue was standing in the centre of the path just yards away.

  ‘I hear you got shot,’ he said, and walked towards him. ‘In the leg.’

  His face was so white, his eyes a translucent green.

  Charlie’s mouth went dry. He became aware of the ever decreasing space between him and the approaching man.

  ‘In the leg,’ Charlie repeated in agreement. ‘Your name is Mims, right?’ He tried to sound casual, or friendly, or both.

  ‘You’re scared of me, aren’t you?’

  ‘What? No,’ he said with a half-laugh.

  ‘I guess there are a lot of rumours going around about me.’

  Until he had started speaking, Charlie had forgotten how Mims’s ‘s’s came out as a hiss because of the way his tongue had been cut.

  ‘I haven’t heard any rumours,’ he lied.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Mims.

  ‘I’m not thinking anything.’

  ‘You’re thinking, does he remember me?’

  Charlie felt his skin condense in fear. He didn’t want to be afraid of him.

  ‘I don’t like you, Charlie. That’s just the way it is. I have singled you out, from all the people in the camp, for no reason other than I can, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve been watching you a lot recently.’ He stepped forward again. ‘But today is the day.’

  Charlie looked back up the hill towards Fields. The American saw Mims and turned. There was a pause.

  ‘Hey,’ called Fields.

  The fist struck Charlie at his temple without him even seeing it. His body spun round and he stuck out his bad leg instinctively for support. When his weight went on to it a pulse of pain shuddered up him and he fell to the floor. He turned his head just as Mims leaped at him, his face filling his whole field of vision. Charlie caught a glimpse of the forked tongue between his lips.