Breakdown (16 page)

Tarquin doesn't wait. He sets off at a run. Lenny follows. He can't run that good. No kid can run gracefully. He's all knees and feet and angles. But he goes fast. I can hardly keep up. I'm weak. The thought of those raw skulls, peeling skin. Faster. I jump gutters. Swerve round trash piled on the pavement.

We sprint down one street. It forks. There's someone out sifting rubbish. We're still in the east? They hurry off when they see us. Must still be the east. We dash left. I glance down one street, across an open space. Glimpse a shape, ghostly white. The Olympic Stadium.

Run.

I focus on the uneven paving slabs. My stomach feels glued to my back. I'm gasping for breath. Dragging it into my chest in great heaving gulps.
We're half a mile away.

My knees turn suddenly shaky, my heart crashes around in my chest. We're only just inside the cover of the streets.

But we're outside the stadium.

Overhead the thin moon races, icy bright. And I realise we made it.
We're free.
I get this feeling, like a horse must've felt in that before time, running wild, mane flying, clods of turf springing from its hooves.
I'm not locked up in Games City. I'm not going to the General.

We speed across an old car park. Tarquin and Lenny are much faster than me. At the far side Tarquin slows and stops. Lenny waits. I reach them, grab hold of Lenny's hand and squeeze it. I squeeze it too hard. He doesn't say anything. He points up at the moon.

‘New beginnings,' he says.

‘New beginnings?' says Tarquin.

‘Yes,' says Lenny.

‘Where the heck d'you get that from?'

‘Don't know,' says Lenny.

New beginnings? I think about it. No. Not for me. I'm going home. This is no new beginning. This is the end of a terrible nightmare. I'm going home to our flat. Nan and me. Where I know how to take care of myself. Where I'm safe alone. No gangs. No gangers. I set my jaw. Nan would tell me to. And not to think twice.

We set off again. Quickly, we put a good distance between us and the stadium. Through the night comes the sound of pans. We zip through a wasteland of tall flats and into a maze of narrow old streets. Boarded-up windows. Light shining through cracks. Smell of fires burning who knows what. People safe indoors. I want to be safe indoors too.

We make it down to the bottom of a street, round a corner, and that's when we see them. Oh God. We've come the wrong way.

A gang of ghetto boys with tracker dogs. The dogs whine and sniff and get our scent. One of them raises its muzzle and howls. The boys bang pan lids. We take one quick look. We don't say anything. We just grab hold of Lenny, one arm each. We take off down the next cutting. God knows where we're going. I don't ask. I don't care as long as it's not Games City.

The sound of the pans so close puts fresh life in me. We run. Like cockroaches from a match flare, we make for the darkest reaches of the street. It's drizzling. Trying to sleet. The banging covers the crunch of shoes, the rattle of breath. City air. The taste of it. Cold and smoky. God, the sour taste of it. A roofline of houses overshadows us. In the darkness we hide from the tiny moon.

I never knew I could run so fast when I felt so weak. Soon we're down that street and turned into another. It's a cul-de-sac. We back up. Look for a way out. They're all dead ends. We take another street. I'm sucking in great lungfuls of air. Tarquin's panting. Lenny's making little choking noises. We don't stop. Down past mildewed market stalls, dark with damp. Crumbling Victorian houses, more trash, old cardboard, sodden, blackened. Old traffic lights, no lights, no traffic. Dodging twisted car frames, scrap metal all rusted onto the pavement. Rats in the gutter. Past the broken glass of old shop fronts, smashed into tiny shards, glittering like raindrops in the moonlight.

We're not lucky.

We go flying around the next corner and it's blocked off. I can't tell whether it's been blocked off on purpose – whether Careem sent gangers out to block off the whole neighbourhood just for us – or if the blockade's been there for ages. Dumpster tanks right across the road, sheet metal and old furniture. Piled high. There's no way round.

We slide to a stop. Broken glass everywhere. Lenny goes down, cuts his hands. He doesn't shriek or anything. He just raises his palm to his face and watches the blood oozing.

‘Hide,' says Tarquin. ‘Get down – out of sight.' He scans the street. He seems to spy something. ‘There.'

We're across the street, down a few houses, up a set of old stone steps and Tarquin shoulders a door. The rotting timber gives. The door creaks open. And we're inside the hall of a terraced building.

Tarquin jams the door shut. We stand there catching our breath. It's dark. Slowly my eyes adjust. Must have once been a family home. Sodden carpets with brownish patterns. A mailbox with its metal flap prised open. Everything's been ransacked.

‘I'm scared,' says Lenny.

‘It'll be OK,' says Tarquin.

‘I'm scared there's someone in here.'

Tarquin stops in midstride. He stands very still. He listens. He kneels down in front of Lenny.

‘Can you hear anything?'

Lenny shakes his head.

We pick our way across the stained carpet, weaving round fallen ceiling tiles. They litter the entrance hall in twisted squares. Some of them are broken and lie in a soggy mess of plaster. We step across them.

‘Wait,' says Tarquin. He dodges back to the entrance and roughs up the pale tracks behind us. Lenny waits. I put my hand on his arm. Tarquin scuffs the carpet with his hand. Removes his shoes and tiptoes back to us. Then he leads the way into a long corridor.

‘We're just gonna hide out for a bit,' he says.

‘OK,' I say.

‘Maybe we can spend the rest of the night,' Tarquin says. He's got his head half turned, listening.

‘But what if they know we're here?' says Lenny.

‘They don't know,' says Tarquin.

‘But they've got dogs,' I say.

‘Maybe they didn't set up that road block for us – they might've done that some other time.'

‘But what if they did?' says Lenny.

‘Then they set it there for us,' says Tarquin, ‘but they don't know we made it this far. They don't know we're out of Games City. They won't come – they ain't going to waste time – they got to meet the Limehouse Crew and swap over their youngers. You're forgetting about that.'

‘I'm not,' says Lenny.

‘The tracker dogs?' I say.

‘The tracker dogs ain't tame dogs. They're just street dogs. Those boys just taking them along to keep the other dogs off mostly.'

‘So they won't follow?'

‘They still can track. If they're put on our scent, they'll find us.'

‘Then we must keep going,' I say.

‘Let's just wait a bit,' says Tarquin.

We sit down underneath the staircase. And wait. He's the ganger, I tell myself. He knows how they operate. The sound of pan banging continues. The drip of water through broken panes. A door creaking upstairs.

‘There ain't nothing,' says Tarquin.

‘It's safe?' I ask. I don't want to leave.

‘We'll hide out here,' says Tarquin.

‘OK.'

‘Lenny got to eat.' Tarquin stands up. ‘I'm going to check the street – see if there's anything. You check in here.' He opens a door. ‘C'mon.'

I take Lenny's hand. We crawl out from under the stairs. We step into a room. High ceilings. Huge sash windows. Wrought-iron fireplace.

‘No one ain't really lived here for years.'

‘But what if they saw us?' says Lenny.

‘They didn't.'

‘Then why did ya brush out the footprints?'

‘They didn't see us. You stay here with her.'

‘Melissa,' I say.

‘Yeah, whatever,' says Tarquin. He shoots a look at me. ‘You stay with him.' The look says: I got you out, we got a deal.

I nod. Not because I care about his deal. I'm sorry about that. If there were a place in Scotland, it'd be different. But there isn't.

And anyway if there were, Nan and me would've gone there long since, and none of this would've happened. But I'm hungry. I'm starved. Maybe he'll get some food. And Lenny's got tight hold of my hand.

I stand in front of the fireplace. Some kind of leaf motif. Blue tiles. Tarquin squats down in front of Lenny. He hugs him and looks him square in the eyes. ‘It'll be OK.'

Lenny nods.

Tarquin looks up at me. Locks falling over one side of his face. Steel-dark eyes. Arched brows. Faint blush on his lips. ‘Here's the flint. Light a fire. Keep Lenny warm. Make a small one in a back room. There's lotsa fires this time of evening. Nobody's gonna notice one more.'

He passes me the flint and steel and the oil cloth. ‘I'll check upstairs, then I'm gone.'

I nod.

He leaves.

‘C'mon, Lenny,' I say. ‘Let's check the place, see what's here.'

I tiptoe back into the hall. Lenny trails behind me. In that before time, rich people lived here. Down the hall, a kitchen – everything gone, except the cooking range, some shelving, old pans thrown on the floor. In the sink, a warped plastic bowl. A toolbox – rifled, rusted nails, a hammer with the shaft broken.

Upstairs, four bedrooms. A double bed in one room, the mattress all sodden and falling out at the bottom. A hole up in the roof. One of the ceilings completely fallen in. Huge damp shadows on the plaster. In another, wallpaper printed with bunnies peels off at the corners. A computer and game box still plugged into the walls, a built-in wardrobe and chest of drawers. They've been emptied. A blue fleece stuffed into a basket.

I pull it out.

‘Might fit you,' I say to Lenny. ‘If you like it?'

I show him the top: there's a big logo on it.

‘OK,' he says. He looks at me. I dust off the hoody and shake it out. I roll up the sleeves. He looks at me.

‘Like it?'

He doesn't answer.

‘I'm talking to you,' I say.

‘You're very pretty, Missa.'

‘Let's try it on?'

He holds out his arms. I slip the hoody over them, over his head.

‘Looks good. Keep you warm.'

‘Till we get to the cottage.'

‘Yeah,' I say, ‘till we get to the cottage.'

With the hoody on, Lenny looks different. He looks like he isn't a Games City younger so much. He trails around the house after me. I find a blanket stuffed under a bed. OK, but it has holes in. A curtain that has been folded and kept for best. I find it downstairs, in the dining room, hidden carefully in the base of a big table. The table's been half broken up and only the base remains. But the curtain's still there in the cross section of the base. I lever it out with a scorched bracket from the fireplace.

The curtain's dry and thick and heavy and made of some kind of raised, slightly shiny weave. It's nice. If I were back at home Nan and I would make something of it, a dress with enough over for a little jacket maybe – something nice we could trade.

There aren't going to be any more long evenings sewing dresses.
Get that into your head.
Look for anything we can make a fire with. It'll be OK in the back room. Nobody'll see the smoke. Too dark and wet out.
They might smell it.
I check the chimney. Still smells of soot. It's been used quite recently. Squatters, looters maybe. We need to eat. We need to keep warm. Maybe Tarquin won't find anything. That little plate of stew Lenny gave me last night can't keep me going much longer.

I search the house. Whoever was here burned nearly everything up. Scorched screws, twisted hinges, lie amongst the embers in the fireplace. I collect what fuel I can. I peel off strips of bunny wallpaper and build a fire. I lay half-burnt chair legs on top of scrunched wallpaper. I prise off lengths of skirting board. Most of it's gone. The only reason that curtain was still there was because the table base was too heavy to move.

I keep looking. I found that curtain. I got a top for Lenny. Not that the top was hidden. There aren't so many kids around these days. They don't make it. Lots of them get born, but lots don't make it.

Radiation is weird. It's there and it's not. You can't see it, but you can see the effects of it. Like with the children. If there were schools, like in Nan's day, I'd understand. If we hadn't had to burn all those books maybe they would have told me about it, if I'd been able to read them properly.

Lenny catches my hand. I stop puzzling. I carry on searching. If those people were so crafty and careful as to hide that curtain in the base of the table, maybe they were careful and crafty about other things. They'd have put stuff somewhere, bound to have.

In that long-before time, people used to think about how they were going to survive.

Nan told me.

‘It was the years after the bombings that were so bad. So many refugees. So many dead. There was no food. All the shops were ransacked. All the canned goods gone. The aid ships came from Australia for a while. And then there were the gangs and the looting.

‘The army took over. Ordered curfews. They'd shoot you on sight if they caught you out. They started building the covered farms, started removing the contaminated topsoil. People hid and hoarded. Stores of food mostly, then things they could trade – weapons, guns, seeds for planting. They built secret places into their houses and hoarded everything.'

I balance on what must once have been a beautiful sofa. Stuffing falling out of the seat. But still strong. If I were a long-ago person living here, where would I hide stuff? If people came looking, where wouldn't they find it?

‘Let's play a game,' I say to Lenny.

He looks at me, blank.

‘A game?'

‘Yeah.'

The blankness doesn't go away. ‘What sort of game?'

‘A game you can play here.'

‘It's not big enough.'

‘Not a sport,' I say. ‘Not football.'

‘What then?'

‘Hide and seek.'

I pass him a piece of fallen plaster. ‘Where're you gonna hide it so nobody's gonna find it?'

Lenny's eyes dart around, up to the ceiling. They skid over the floor. He bites the edge of his lip. He's thinking hard about the game. He knits his face tight. Then he leaps up and crosses the room and pulls at a piece of hardboard that's warped and sticking out under the dado rail. It shifts and buckles out. He shoves the plaster lump in there. ‘That's where I'm gonna hide it,' he says.

How smart. Back in the day, that hardboard wouldn't have been all springing up and out of its fittings. It would have been neatly slotted into the wall and painted over. I go round the room tapping on the boards. I don't actually need to tap much. They fall out.

There isn't anything there. I stop after a bit and let it go.

Lenny still plays the game. He makes me go and stand in the next room.

‘You don't look,' he says.

I don't. Well, not at him. I creep to the window, carefully look out onto the street. I scan as far as I can see. There's little light, just the faint moon. No sign of gangers. I listen to see if I can hear pans. I can hear them. Out there, beating a rhythm. They're still looking for us.

A flare between two houses. Firebrands? The pan beat is nearer. Maybe one street away. Please don't let them find this house. Where's Tarquin? When's he going to get back? If he's gone out looting, if he's trying to take out a dog, he might be gone hours. I want him back. Not just because of the food. Though my stomach is still stuck fast to my back. Like there's a hole where it used to be.

Lenny appears with a box. Cardboard, stapled at the corners. Dust caked thick, like grey icing. Chinese letters stencilled on the sides. Inside are packets.

I can't make out what they are. It's so dark in here. It could be food. I rip back the old dry cardboard and pick out the packing. Thin strips of shredded paper. I lift one of the packets. I carry it to the back window. Try and examine it in the moonlight. I've never seen anything like it. Square and brittle and kind of crumbly. At first I think it's biscuits, broken crackers. But I've never seen biscuits like this. I slit open one of the packs. Inside are thin wires of white crumbly stuff.

‘What is it, Missa?' asks Lenny.

He reaches forwards and snaps off a piece and crunches it between his teeth. A weird look passes over his face. He tries chewing, but it looks like he can't make it out any better than I can. I flick up another pack. I sit there trying to read what's written on it. The light's bad. The print's too small. Some of the writing has flaked off.

‘Noo  … ' I read. ‘I think it says “noodles”.'

‘Noodles,' repeats Lenny. We look at each other.

I've heard of noodles. About five years ago China sent aid ships packed with foodstuffs: rice, dried meat, dried vegetables, noodles. The food was supposed to be for the children. There'd been a very harsh winter. ‘A proper throwback to the nuclear ones we had after the explosions,'
Nan had said.

We were starving. So many children died. But we never got the food. The army took it. These packets must be from then. Someone must have traded for them, hidden them, meant to come back for them.

‘What is it, Missa?'

‘It's food.'

‘It don't taste like food.'

I turn the packet over in my hand. I crack the white stuff between my thumb and forefinger. Is it still good to eat?

‘Maybe they're like potatoes,' says Lenny. ‘Maybe you gotta cook 'em first.'

That kid is smart. I look at the package again. I try to read the writing. There's a section in Chinese, but at the bottom of the pack, screened onto the cellophane inside a red-lined box is written:
BOIL IN WATER UNTIL SOFT.

We go back to the fireplace. I strike a spark onto the oil rag. Lenny fans the embers with a broken piece of hardboard, feeds in dry tinder, splinters of broken panelling, half burnt bits of old wood. Soon we can remove the oil rag and build the flames, feed a length of skirting on.

At the back of the house, outside the broken kitchen door, is a short patio. To one side a downspout. Under it, a collection of plastic flowerpots – silted up, careened over – have trapped rainwater. I scoop off the water, careful not to disturb the sediment, and half fill a cooking pot from the kitchen.

Lenny trails after me, watching.

‘If we boil the water well,' I say, ‘it's gonna be fine.'

I don't know how much to boil. I fill the pan up and carry it to the hearth. It takes a long time. Some of the water slops out of the pan and douses half the fire. I shove a piece of brick into the hearth. I balance the pan back on it. After a long time the water heats. I put in two noodle packs. I break them into pieces and feed them in. I tip in the little dried sauce packs that go with them. I stir it and fork it down, mashing the pieces and squashing them in with an old table fork. Then we sit there.

‘How long we gotta wait?' asks Lenny. His eyes, huge and round. He's staring at the pot of noodles. They bubble. A frothy scud of foam builds up around the edge of the pan. They smell good. Dry and spicy. ‘Can we play another game?' he asks.

‘What d'you wanna play?' I say. ‘'Cos we got to watch these noodles.'

‘Let's play living in Scotland.'

‘OK.'

‘I'm gonna be a duckling.'

‘I'm gonna be a pesky squirrel,' I say and I throw bits of grit from the floor at him.

‘I wanna be a squirrel too,' he says. And throws the grit back.

‘Let's pretend we're hens,' I say. ‘This room can be our henhouse.'

Lenny sits up and does an imitation of a hen softly clucking.

‘What're we going to eat?' I say.

‘Them.'

The noodles have swollen up and filled the pot with white squiggly wires.

‘They're our worms.' Lenny picks up the fork and reaches forward.

‘Wait,' I say. ‘We don't eat from the pot when I'm cooking. Run and get that bowl from the kitchen.'

Lenny runs. He comes back with the warped plastic bowl. I slop a bit of the gluey water into it and swill it out.

‘Chuck this outside.' I pass the bowl back to Lenny.

In a flash he's dumped the gluey water outside and skipped back, holding the bowl out to me again. He squawks, ‘I want worms.'

I lop a load of noodles into it. The grey mess lies there all lumpy, sticking to itself, but it looks like food. And it smells OK.

We sit together, sharing the bowl. Playing at being chickens. The flames suddenly flicker, like a breeze has caught them. The steam off the noodles swirls.

Someone has opened a door, down the hall, by the front.

A floorboard creaks.

I pause my spoon before my lips. Lenny jumps up. I lower my spoon, stand up. ‘Hide,' I whisper. ‘Be quick. I'll stop them.'

I don't know who it is.

I don't know if I can stop them.