The Book of Air Page 8

  ‘You don’t mind being watched?’

  ‘This high up?’

  ‘They’ll see your candle.’

  ‘Who? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘We’ve no idea who’s out there.’

  ‘In this weather?’

  ‘Beggars and scavengers – half-wild already before everything crashed, before the lights went out. Ready to take whatever we’ve got.’

  ‘What if there are good things happening? People better equipped than us, with generators and access to petrol, getting things organised.’

  ‘You’re a hopeless optimist.’

  The rain comes on heavier. I hear it rattling the slates, washing into the gutters. It’s filling the downpipes and slopping from the hopper heads. I’ve got to get up on a ladder and clear the leaves out, see where the slates have slipped. I know what water can do. It’s somewhere in the attic already, trickling along the undersides of the rafters, collecting in pools between the joists. A ticking clock.

  Deirdre has filled two glasses with red wine. She sits on the bed to hand me one. The candle flickers on the bedside table, catching a draft from the window.

  ‘I’m sorry for waking you.’

  ‘I was dreaming of the sea.’

  ‘It’s because of the storm. I can’t sleep. Doesn’t it excite you? Drink with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I don’t have to drink by myself.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve been doing?’

  She shrugs. ‘I found the bottle in one of my bags. One thing at least Abigail hasn’t got her claws into.’

  I sit up and take the glass. Her face softens. She clinks my glass with her own, and winces as they collide more noisily than she intended. She pulls out a handkerchief and dabs at the bedding.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. Poor sheet.’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Poor glasses.’

  ‘They look all right.’

  ‘This time. But for how long? And nowhere to buy more of them.’ She reaches out to draw my hair back from my face. ‘How are we going to cope?’

  ‘With plastic and cracked mugs, I suppose, and plenty of booze.’

  ‘From where?’ Her hand is rough and scented with wood smoke.

  ‘We’ll make our own. We’ll grow hops or cider apples. We’ll use potatoes and set up a still. We’ll find ways of getting drunk. People always have.’

  ‘When did you last have a haircut?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘I’ll give you one tomorrow if you like.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’m finding the leak.’

  ‘You said it made you dizzy, going up the ladder.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ll get over it.’

  She lifts my left hand towards the light. ‘Do you always wear this?’ She’s looking at my wedding ring.

  ‘I take it off to work. My fingers swelled up when I was sick and I thought it was stuck for good. Now it’s so loose I’m afraid of losing it.’

  She turns it on my finger. ‘Is it just the light or is there a thread of silver in it?’

  ‘It’s white gold.’

  ‘Just round the edge, like a wave. You’d hardly notice.’

  ‘My wife chose it.’

  ‘You’ve got blisters.’ She winces as she touches them.

  ‘I’m not used to digging.’

  There’s a flash of lightning. Deirdre pulls back, startled, looking out at the sky. We’re both waiting for the rumble of thunder. When it comes, she says, ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither am I really. We’ll get so bored of eating the same things we’ll forget to eat.’

  There’s more lightning and we wait again for the thunder.

  ‘The thing about the wallet… I know you all thought I was making a ridiculous fuss. And you were right. What is it all – credit cards, business cards, club cards, loyalty cards – worth nothing now. Driving licence, gym pass, lovely crisp twenties from the cash machine. And what’s it for?’ She blows her nose into her handkerchief. ‘Maybe it was Aleksy, now I think about it. He’s obsessed by me. It’s his room we should have searched, not mine.’

  ‘How long have you known Aleksy?’

  ‘A couple of weeks. Which makes him my oldest friend.’ She shivers. Do you mind if I close the curtain? There’s a draught from the window.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Or I could get in beside you. It’s a big enough bed. And we could watch the sky together.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘How English you are.’ Her smile wavers in the candlelight. ‘I saw the way you were looking at me before. In my room. How you touched my things, folded my underwear. You have good hands, in spite of the blisters.’

  ‘I didn’t like to see them on the floor.’

  ‘I bet you wouldn’t mind seeing them on me though.’ She stands up from the bed and turns, pulling her dressing gown open. ‘What do you think?’ She poses in the candlelight, head turned, decorated in nylon, satin, lace – playful and embarrassed, enjoying her embarrassment, enjoying mine.

  I say, ‘Tell me about Aleksy. How did you meet?’

  ‘You’re jealous of Aleksy?’

  ‘Should I be?’

  Her face hardens and she covers herself. ‘Ah, I get it. You’re deferring to Aleksy. You feel you should get his approval, maybe. Well when you two have worked something out, be sure to let me know.’

  ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘How about if you wrestle for me. I get a ringside seat and the winner throws me over his shoulder.’

  ‘Christ, Deirdre, that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I met him on the road, all right! He helped me pull the cart out of a ditch. It was his fault, because his car backfired and startled the horse. A couple of miles later, there he was again – he’d run out of petrol. I gave him a lift. We’re not married. I’m not his woman. I’m not anybody’s. When did the rules change?’ She starts to cry – deep wrenching sobs.

  I reach out to her and she slumps beside me on the bed.

  ‘It’s OK.’ I’m holding her, stroking her hair and she’s clinging to my neck.

  ‘You shouldn’t drink if you’re sick.’

  ‘I’m not sick.’

  ‘I heard you earlier. After dinner. I heard you outside, out in the rain, throwing up. Afterwards you sat by the fire. Your hair was wet.’

  ‘Too much garlic.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t notice. Abigail does her best with what she’s got.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s a salt and pepper kind of cook. Now she’s hiding the salt and using garlic instead.’

  ‘While stocks last.’

  ‘It grows wild in the woods. It’s the salt that’s irreplaceable. And the pepper. And sugar, chocolate, coffee, olives, oysters, crisp dry Muscadet…’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Everything’s ending.’ She mumbles this at my chest. I feel her breath against me. ‘You can have me if you want, Jason. I mean obviously. That’s why I’m here.’

  The wind rattles the window.

  ‘Or am I too pale for you, too white?’ She giggles nervously. ‘I could never get a tan. Five minutes of sun and I come out in freckles. I used to slap it on. Lovely brown legs out of a bottle. But you won’t notice in the candlelight. We’re all beautiful by candlelight. Pain and sweat and struggle and hunger, that’s our life from now on, and more beauty than we can bear.’

  ‘Your legs are fine.’

  ‘Because I’m probably not your type. I suspect you have a thing for exotic women.’

  I lift her head away from me and look into her face. Green eyes, she’s got, and ash blonde hair, dark at the roots. ‘How drunk are you?’

  ‘One glass, that’s all. Maybe two. I meant because of the boy, because of Simon. Not that you can afford to be picky – given the way things are, I mean.’

  ‘He said something? Because you probably didn’t understand him.’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, not much of a talker is he.’

  ‘He’s a good boy.’

  ‘Who said he isn’t?’ Deirdre shrugs, drinks from her wine glass, looks out at the driving rain. ‘So what was she like?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Simon’s mother. West Indian, was she? Afro-something-or-other? Gorgeous anyway, judging by his looks, which, no offence, he didn’t get from you.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.’

  ‘Oh I’ve been paying attention all right.’ She moves closer, and her words are warm against my face. ‘But my own tastes are not angelic. In either sense.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’ll get the idea.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘Probably. I’m afraid most of the time.’

  ‘Simon’s not mine, you know.’

  ‘Adopted?’

  ‘I’m his uncle.’

  ‘His uncle? Wow. Of course. Who’s left but orphans, widows, mothers of dead children?’

  ‘I assumed Abigail had filled you in.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about Abigail.’ Her mouth tastes of wine. Her hands are behind her, busy adjusting and unclipping. Then they’re in my hair and on my chest. She makes a noise in her throat. I’m assaulted by loneliness. It doesn’t stop me, but it’s there anyway, holding my mind separate from my body. Sorry, Caro. Sorry for you, dead and gone, bulldozed into the ground. Sorry for me, doing this, like everything else now, alone. Sorry, but there’s comfort in the contact, and my heart settles to it. It was racing back there with all that talk of Simon, and Simon’s parentage. But it’s all right. Deirdre doesn’t know. So Django doesn’t know, and what I see in his eyes is just his way of looking.

  ‘Ow, ow. It’s OK. Don’t stop. Ow.’

  ‘Sorry. I hurt you.’

  ‘They’re just a bit sore.’

  I draw back and raise my head to find her eyes. I heard her in the garden throwing up, and I know it wasn’t the garlic. ‘Are you pregnant?’ The question feels arbitrary, the way it comes to me. I expect her to laugh, and she tries to, but her expression is evasive and gives me the answer. Even by candlelight I see the flush of colour on her neck. She settles on a defiant stare.

  ‘So that’s what this is about.’

  ‘What? You think I need a man to take care of me?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘You know nothing about me – what I’m capable of. Just because my moods are on the surface you think I must be feeble. But I can take care of myself. I managed fine before I got here.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  She climbs off the bed, wrapping herself up, and stands at the window. ‘It wasn’t easy on the road, you know, with the cart, and the goats to slow me down. There were times when I was pretty much a sitting target. And don’t think I couldn’t have just chucked some food in the Land Rover instead, don’t think I wasn’t tempted.’

  ‘You had petrol?’

  ‘Almost a full tank.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because getting to safety is nothing if you’ve got no way to live. Fat lot of use your car’s going to be.’

  ‘So you made the right choice. Congratulations.’

  ‘You make it sounds so easy. You haven’t a clue.’

  ‘About what? I know what’s been going on. I’ve dug my share of graves. I know what it’s like to survive on what you can steal, what you can fight for. Tell me what I’m missing, Deirdre.’

  I think at first she isn’t going to answer. When she does, her voice is almost drowned by the storm. ‘So these two men stopped me on the road. They wanted to know what I was carrying on the cart.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Weeks ago. Before Aleksy. One of them just began unloading my boxes on to the verge. A fat ape he was, with a nose like a pig. The other one said he wanted to see what was in them before wasting his time, and he took out a knife and started cutting them open. I assumed he was the boss. So I told him he could have me if he left the stuff. While he was unzipping his trousers I asked him what he’d been – you know, before – and he said a city trader. He seemed sort of harmless, quite nice in a way, except he stank. Next thing we were doing it right there on the verge. He hadn’t finished before the ape pulled him off me and said it was his turn. The trader swore at him and I said that wasn’t the deal, but the ape hit me and started anyway. The trader’s knife was just there, in the grass, where he’d left it. I got the pig-faced bastard in the thigh. Then I went for his back. I hit a rib, felt it jarring all up my arm. He got off me then, or the trader rolled him off.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘What do you think? The trader finished the job.’

  ‘Unloading the boxes?’

  ‘Not that job.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘He’s the father, probably. Though I can’t say for sure.’

  I want to ask her how this ended. Did the trader keep his side of the bargain or what? But she’s finished talking. She looks out at the storm for a minute. Then she covers her face. After a while I hear small bleating noises.

  She’s a mess, but I’m no better – just a different kind of mess. We’re none of us any better. Abigail drives herself like an ox. Maud’s lost the power of speech. Django, if he was ever normal, has retreated into his own world. Aleksy struggles with a repertoire of blinks and twitches.

  ‘You’ll be all right.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know?’

  ‘We’ll take care of you.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and Abigail.’

  She’s staring out the window again.

  I used to think of myself as walking forward into the future, constructing the future I was walking into. I used to think of myself as not wasting energy thinking of myself as one thing or another, but just doing what had to be done. Now I seem to stand sideways on, watching some version of me that isn’t quite me. I notice myself feeling things. Or not. Or more than one thing at a time. Now, for example.

  I pull my trousers on and go up to her at the window.

  ‘Deirdre… talk to Abigail.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jason. No, don’t touch me. I don’t want your hands on me. Just fuck right off out of my life.’

  ‘Tell her you’re pregnant. She can help.’

  ‘The horses are mine, by the way, and the goats, and most of the edible food is what I brought – whatever Abigail thinks, hiding it in the cellar like it’s her personal hoard.’

  ‘Get some rest, Deirdre.’

  ‘I was all right on the road and I’ll be all right again, don’t you worry.’ She’s reached the door and stands with the bottle in her hand. ‘Once a month in the missionary position, that’ll be Abigail’s idea of sex, if she ever lets you into her capacious knickers. Because Abigail’s idea of sex, in fact, is snuggling up with Maud. Or hadn’t you worked that out yet? They just let you stay to dig holes and shovel shit.’

  ‘Sleep it off.’

  ‘Sleep the fuck off yourself. And then you can pack up your pretentious wine glasses in your chav wet dream of a car and you can leave us all the fuck alone, because we don’t need you here.’

  She slams the door behind her and it swings open again. The catch is worn – something else that needs fixing that I haven’t time to fix. Her footsteps are unsteady on the backstairs. I hear her stumble and swear. For a moment there’s nothing louder than the storm. Pulling on a sweater I go out to the landing and listen while she gets to her feet again and makes it down to the first floor. There are other footsteps, another voice murmuring comfort – Abigail seeing her safely to bed, or Aleksy thinking he’s in with a chance.

  It’s only when I turn again to my door that I see Django sitting with his back to the wall. There’s barely enough light to see his expression, but it’s one I’ve seen before. He does compassion like a mime-artist, head to one side, mouth and eyebrows arched. He holds his jacket open.

  ‘It’s Deirdre who
needs the flowers,’ I tell him. But it isn’t flowers this time. A box of chocolates, perhaps. He pulls it from the inner pocket and shows it to me. It’s a copy of the Bible. So that’s all he’s got. No secret knowledge, no plan of vengeance, just the promise of salvation.

  ‘It’s a new heaven,’ he says, ‘and a new earth.’

  ‘But the same old rain.’

  Beyond him, further along the corridor, water drips into the cooking pot. Either we pay attention, or we abandon the place to the slow invasion of nature, the seep and drip of water finding the weak points, until a dozen winters have split it open like a fallen trunk for woodlice to crawl through and rodents and nesting birds. Which is what’s happening – here and everywhere. It starts with a cracked slate or a choked gutter or someone smashing a window in search of food. The heat’s off, the damp’s rising. The works of man are rotting from the inside.

  Agnes

  I would say where I am, but I hardly know how to. I am put to bed among the ruins of the endtimers, and Brendan nearby in another room. They call this the O. I can call it neither Hall nor cottage nor forest.

  I have climbed three flights of stairs to a pile of sacking. There is a broken window and the branch of a tree reaching above my head. I am half afraid to lie down in such a disordered place. At home my mother sleeps across from me. I think I shall never rest without the noise of her dreams. I remember the box of treasures hidden under my bed – my father’s best knife and the little bird he carved with it, and the chain he had from his mother, as fine and supple as a thread of water lit by the moon.

  Brendan was waiting in the ruin, as he promised he would be. I mean our ruin at the edge of the village. I never knew there were so many more ruins, so many broken walls.

  It was hard at first riding with no reins or stirrups and nothing but Brendan’s coat to cling to. The wind was rising and there was a great commotion of leaves and creaking branches. We travelled eastward and had soon left the village far behind. I think I slept, perhaps only for a moment, perhaps for longer. We passed cottages with fallen roofs. Towards dawn, we came down into the heart of a ruin vaster than I could ever have imagined, pieces of wall and sloping timbers all overgrown, extending beyond the road on either side, until they were lost in woodland and mist.