Anarchy (24 page)

Her wad of cash thinned quickly. She didn't want to use plastic in case it gave away where she was, but when she became desperate and tried anyway, it turned out the card machines in the supermarket weren't working.
Asda's got the Plague,
someone yelled gleefully from the back of the queue. The next night she experimented with curling herself into a dry and sheltered corner around the back of a quiet petrol station, and was amazed to discover how cold the night was, and how full of imaginary threats. She lasted less than three hours before cycling toward the nearest glow on the horizon and paying far more than she wanted to for a room above a pub. The next day she risked using a cash machine, thinking she was far enough out in the country by now that Nigel wouldn't be able to track her even if he saw the transaction online and came straight here. The machine ate her card.

By elusive degrees the towns grew stranger. It was nothing she could pin down. She saw what she expected to see, pasty young mothers, men in work clothes looking at machinery, dog walkers, pensioners, drab corner shops, and low-rise schools, but something had changed, or was about to change. The patterns were out of kilter. The mothers weren't around the schools at the right times, or the men around the pubs, or the pensioners around the post offices. Everyone seemed wary of everyone else. And there were fewer of them, she was sure of it. She thought at first it was just an effect of the hours she spent alone in her strange bubble of sweat and weariness and the buzz of the chain and the hiss of tires on the road, but the emptiness wasn't only in her. The winter skies swathed the villages in it, the wind blew it down every dead-end lane and across every unmowed playground. The world had had the stuffing pulled out of it. Its shape and its fullness were going. It felt limp. Almost ready for the tip, she thought; almost ready to be thrown out.

The weather turned against her as well. She rode west and a cold rain blew east, slowing her down, soaking through her gloves and down the neck of her top. Her clothes stank, her hands blistered, the withered muscles in her bad leg winced with every crank of the pedals. She'd thought that nothing as trivial as bodily pain would matter to her anymore, but she had to stop more and more often, and when she stopped she thought more and more intently about what it would be like to be dry, to be clean, to put her feet up, to have food waiting for her, to turn round and put the relentless wind at her back. Then she would remember all the things she'd done to earn her punishment.

—
Good night, Mum.

—
Night night.

—
Mum?

—
What?

—
Can you stay a bit longer?

—
No. Night night. Go to sleep.

—
Please?

—
No. I can't. I've got a lot to do.

—
Just five minutes.

—
For God's sake, Gav. You're too old for this.

—
I'm really scared.

—
Scared of what? It's bedtime. There's nothing to be scared of.

—
Just a couple of minutes. Then I promise I'll go to sleep.

—
No. No, Gavin, I can't stay with you every night for just a couple of minutes. You've got to get over this. You frighten yourself silly with these stories you tell yourself. You've just got to stop it.

—
I'm trying, Mum.

—
Oh, God. Don't start crying. Jesus. I don't have time for this.

—
I'm sorry.

—
No, you're not sorry. If you were sorry you'd stop doing it.

—
I can't help it!

—
I'm closing the door. I'll come back in half an hour to make sure you're okay. All right?

—
Don't close the door!

—
If you're going to cry like that, I'll have to close the door. Dad and I have work to do.

—
Please!

—
It's your bedroom. It's your own bedroom. There's no one else here. No one can come in. All right? If you think there's anyone else in here, then it's because you imagined it, you did, all by yourself. You're going to have to start learning to unimagine them. I don't have time to go through this every night. Night night now.

—
Mum!

“I'm sorry,” she mumbled aloud, between gasps of effort as the hostile wind tried to stop her completely. “I'm sorry.” She wondered sometimes what she'd say to him when she finally tracked him down. That was all it came down to.
I've made myself suffer as much as I can. I'm sorry.

• • •

Signs told her she was not far from Bristol. Less than halfway there, and her cash was running low. Everything was supposed to be cheaper in the country, but in the village shops they made her pay twice or three times what it said on the sticker even for a tin of fruit. One bristlingly irate lady refused to serve her at all.
I don't want your money. You can clear off. It's your sort's to blame for all of this. Go on. Clear off, or I'm getting my husband.
She'd snatched a chocolate bar on her way out and pedaled away from shouts and screeches and insults and threats, listening anxiously for the sounds of a car behind, but no one had followed. There weren't many cars on the roads anyway. She'd overheard someone ranting about petrol shortages that same morning.

In an area of exhaustingly tightly folded small valleys—there were snowdrops in the hedges, ignoring whatever had changed; to them it was just another season passing—she came to a place where the narrow lane was barred. Bright orange police tape was spooled across it.
do not cross
, it said. A paper sign had been taped to a tree; the rain had made it entirely illegible. Two bulky concrete roadblocks sat under the tape. She ducked and steered the bike past them, then freewheeled down into the outskirts of a village.

The place was deserted. She'd become attuned to different degrees of background silence. The bike clicked and squeaked rhythmically, the spokes whirred, her own breath was a constant rasp, but when she was out of the wind and away from people those noises sharpened and drew somehow close. She rode through the village feeling as if she was miles away from the nearest dwelling. It had been a comfortable place once, but every house yawned with emptiness as she passed. She came to the bottom of the valley where the roads met. A helpful blue arrow indicated her way southward. She was about to turn that way when it occurred to her that there might be a shop.

She'd already begun to fantasize about finding a village shop momentarily unattended. Five seconds to fill her pockets and she'd be out the door and riding away, no money spent and a day's calories in her bags. Or passing a shop in the dark, far from any houses, and seeing things behind unbarred and unwatched windows. Her pump was a solid aluminum tube. She was sure it would break glass. How hard could theft be? But here it seemed like she had a whole village to herself, a prosperous,
Telegraph
-reading Somerset village. She stopped and listened for a while. There was a steady racket of crows somewhere behind the houses. Their clamor reinforced the desertion; wild birds didn't gather so noisily when there were people around.

She turned the wrong way at the junction and rode slowly toward the village center, watching for any signs of life.

She came, as she'd hoped, to a shop. It was as silent and as shut as every other building she'd passed. She felt all the windows looking down at her. She waited a long while on its doorstep before rattling the handle tentatively. When she pressed her face to the window she could see stacked shelves inside, biscuits and soup and plastic-wrapped bread.

She had the bicycle pump in her hand and was staring at the glass, breathing hard, when she caught the reflection of someone moving across the street behind her.

She swiveled around in abrupt shame, thinking to get straight back on her bike. At first she thought the person who'd surprised her was a pensioner in a black shawl, coming out of one of the humbler houses opposite. Then she saw a young hand feeling at the door, not coming out but trying to get in. What she'd taken for a shawl was a hijab. The person was a pudgy girl, badly dressed in a beige anorak and black leggings and cheap flat boots. She didn't seem to have noticed Iz at all. She fumbled slowly around the door of the house as if bewildered to find it shut.

As Iz watched, held in place by her reflex of embarrassed guilt, the girl backed away from the door and shuffled along the grassy verge to the next house. She stood in front of it for a moment and then prodded its door as well. She was facing away and half hidden by her head scarf, but even so Iz was touched by the peculiar hopelessness of the gesture. She couldn't have been older than Gav. Another lost child.

“Excuse me,” Iz said. “I don't think anyone's here.”

The girl turned around slowly, looking dull and confused.

“Are you lost?”

The girl didn't answer. Her shoulders sagged and her mouth was half open. She was clutching something green and messy in one hand. It looked like a fistful of wilted salad.

“Everyone's left, I think,” Iz said. “The police have closed it off for some reason.”

The girl stepped hesitantly closer. Her eyes didn't focus. She moved as if following the sound of Iz's voice, as if she was blind.

“Lizzie?” the girl said.

Iz dropped the bicycle pump.

“Lizzie? Is that you?” The girl shuffled toward her. “Say something.”

Horrified beyond reason, Iz backed into the window behind her, stumbled, turned the corner, and ran.

“Lizzie?”

There was only one way to go, a narrow street between empty white cottages. Her legs were used to pedaling and wouldn't run properly. She staggered away, bile in her mouth.

“Help,” the strange sad voice called behind her, still coming. “Please.” There was a corner ahead. She ran around it. A fenced path went between the last house and an enclosed farmyard, ending in a gate with an open field beyond. Unable to think where she was going beyond the urge to get away, she stumbled along the path. A flock of crows rose up from the field ahead.

“Lizzie.” Or perhaps it was just the gargling of the crows; she didn't stop to look over her shoulder. She pushed through the gate into wet grass, looking around, thinking,
my bike, I left my bike behind
, and yet unable to turn back or even slow down. There were stones standing upright in the field, immense weathered red-brown fists and knuckles like petrified eruptions of the deep earth's age. Lengths of police tape were strewn around them in the grass. The view opened wider and more stones appeared, huge, some as tall as she and all a thousand times more immense. They seemed to be leaning in. She smelled a putrid and deathly smell. Something like a mound of abandoned bedding lay ahead of her, out in the field. Two more crows screeched up from it as she approached. When she saw that, she wanted very badly to stop. She had to go back, to get her bike, to ride away. She looked over her shoulder involuntarily and stumbled in the long grass, spinning around. It felt as if the sky spun with her. The stones were a ring around her, and the pile of fabric lay in its center. Not bedding, she saw, as she dropped to her hands and knees, but clothes, a mound of clothes.

Ugly flat boots.

Her gaze fixed on the boots and jammed.

The same ugly flat boots. Black leggings, torn to reveal glimpses of mottled white filth. Iz covered her nose and mouth with her hand as she got herself to her feet. The stench was death and rot. The ground seemed to be humming with a subacoustic groan, the voice of the assembled stones. Like an optical illusion falling into place, the reality of what she was looking at showed itself. It became booted feet, bloated legs, a maggoty corpse swathed in nylon and polyester and grime, a grimacing bloodless head half separated from the body by a long gash too revolting to look at. The hijab was still tied around the head. Iz reeled and turned and bolted. The chthonic rumble surged under her feet. Shadows fell around her as though the stones were moving. Her path into the field was a swath of flattened grass. She followed it unthinkingly. No one was ahead of her or behind; the village was empty of all but its dead. She ran under the compulsion of absolute terror, stumbled across her bike, and rode away out of the village and along the closed road until she had to stop to throw up.

19

S
he lost her way badly that afternoon, and as dusk came she found herself with no choice but to beg and bribe the landlords of a nakedly unwelcoming local pub for the use of an unprepared and unheated upstairs room. The thought of going on in the darkness looking for somewhere else was unbearable. She handed over most of her remaining twenty-pound notes. At least they let her wash in hot water. She barricaded the door to the room and lay on a mattress covered in a plastic sheet, listening to the grumbles of regulars coming up through the floorboards.

The next day she was puffing through a village when she passed a church with an open door. She hadn't seen the inside of a church in thirty years, but it suddenly seemed like the right place for her to go and take the step that needed taking. Some change had been completed, some accidental rite of passage. She didn't even know what it was, exactly. (“That's the point!” shouted the spotty leftie woman with the fiercely earnest eyes and the unfashionably lumpen glasses, standing on a stile to overlook her little audience and the cameramen behind them, all gathered in a snowy field. Her fervor made her shine for the cameras.
She can't get enough of being on TV, that one,
Nigel sneered. “We don't know! That's the point! You can't talk about these things that way. It's not up to us to decide whether it's true or false. We have to stop thinking like that, before we do anything else.”) She only knew that she'd arrived at the place of certainty where Gavin had lived all along. It had been so simple for him.

—
Who's that, Mum?

—
Who?

—
That man. The little one. No, you're looking the wrong way.

—
Gav, love . . .

—
He's gone now.

Or:

—
Mum?

—
Yes, love?

—
If we go to Italy this holiday, will Miss Grey be there?

—
Of course she will. If you want her to be. Don't you think?

—
I don't know. Wouldn't she need a ticket for the airplane?

She sat in a pew and apologized, out loud, for all of her forty-three years. She knew now what she'd say to Gavin when she got there and found him. There was no question of pleading with him to go back with her, no nonsense about wanting to be a family again. That lie was over. She'd go with him and Gwen, wherever they were, whatever they were doing. She'd drink herbal tea and meditate and wear crystal pendants, as long as they'd have her; and they would, because they'd see how sorry she was and how far she'd come. They'd know she meant it.

Some people came into the church and wanted to talk to her. They offered tea and biscuits—some fundamentals of the Church of England had survived even that winter—but she got up and left and rode away without a word. She paused only to rifle through the damp and stinking clothes in her panniers, pull out her powerless mobile phone, and drop it in the nearest dustbin.

She went a long way that day. The last residues of doubt she'd been hauling along with her were shed. Like thousands and thousands of others, she'd achieved the full knowledge that there was no going back. Her face felt raw in the rushing air as she wheeled down the long flank of the Mendip Hills, down into the wide levels out of which the tor of Glastonbury rose like the pyramid of a green desert. From five miles away she could hear snatches of tinselly music, and see tufts of smoke and the encampments they rose from, tent villages lapping around the foot of the hill. She came across other people on the road, walking, cycling, a few camper vans. Some of them tried to halt her too, but she went on. Nothing could stop her now that she knew what she was doing.

This must have been what it was like for her twin all the time, she reflected. She thought about Iggy constantly. She remembered feeling a kind of amused pity for Iggy's convictions. One week it might be wearing unbleached cotton to save the world; a month later and she'd be off to post-communist Romania to volunteer in orphanages. Now, at last, she understood the pity Iggy must have felt for her. How feeble her contemptible conventional sister must have seemed to Ygraine, fearless warrior of her own conscience. (They nicknamed her Xena at university: skinny, flat-chested, fox-faced Iggy. The incongruity was nine-tenths of the joke.) Iggy would have been in Cornwall days ago. She'd have pedaled from dawn to dusk. No: weeks ago, months ago. Iggy wouldn't have wasted time trying to deal with the useless police. She wouldn't have sat around picking the scabs of her grief, torturing herself in pathetic solitude. She'd have driven there straightaway, without crashing the car. There'd have been no need for any of it, in fact, because Gav wouldn't have left her in the first place. She was his real mother, she'd have listened to him, he'd have loved her. He came from her, that was the truth of it. Pushing herself against the wind, legs hardening, blisters turning to tough calluses, Iz hoped that perhaps she was becoming a little bit like her sister. She was earning the right to be Gav's mother too.

The first soldiers she saw were at a supermarket on a ring road outside some substantial county town. An army jeep was parked by the sliding doors. Two young men rested their hands on weapons and ambled back and forth by the ranks of shopping carts. The shelves inside were more than half empty.

They'd heard about this in London. Radiating up-country from its epicenter in the far southwest, the mysterious disintegration of normal existence had been most of the news. Not just news: rumor as well, and myth. There were facts: the freakish weather; the outbursts of public disorder; the self-styled pilgrims; the state of emergency; the closed roads and helicopter drops and rationed goods; spotty Ruth delivering her strangely compelling open-air sermons to ever-increasing crowds. And then there were the things that didn't quite feel like facts: the persistence of the snow; the random nonsense e-mail messages, the holes in Web pages, other meaningless hiccups in the virtual world; the blurry photo of some black, huge, beaked thing on a woodland path; the video footage of something that might have been the same black thing, flying; the people who stopped showing up to work and the children who stopped going to school, as if work and school didn't matter anymore. And then, as December turned to January and all those things showed no signs of being replaced by the next story, as all news no matter how good or bad was eventually supposed to be replaced, there were the things no one could print or broadcast, things that were no more than intuitions, yet unmistakable and haunting nevertheless. The fraying of the order of things. The whispers of anarchy. The end times coming.

For Londoners like Nigel and Iz, supposedly protected by the charmed circle of institutionalized prosperity, all of these things happened
elsewhere,
in the not quite real realm of TV news. Londoners weren't choked immobile by weeks of snow or overflown by monstrous black birds. To them it had all happened at one remove, at least until it translated itself into the kind of existential crisis people like Nigel understood. The bottom fell out of the stock market, or the top of it was blown off, or its walls caved in: Iz didn't exactly understand its architecture. People like Iggy had always said it had no architecture at all. They said it had always been a thing of paper and breath and hope, and when enough people held their breath, down it came. But even that catastrophe was manageable compared to what they saw on the news. The collapse of imaginary value was, after all, a story with a familiar shape. It just meant that things were going badly instead of (as they'd always been promised) going well. The other kind of news, out at the margins of the country, was altogether different. It spoke not of things going badly, but just
going
. Going, going, gone. Off-white emptiness in the supermarket aisles, villages abandoned. Iz was seeing it now for herself, at last.

For the first time in months she smiled to herself. She was coming close.

• • •

She accidentally lost the signed route again as her legs began to give out. Backtracking through wet and overgrown lanes, the afternoon light thinking about fading, she passed a house she'd noticed earlier. It was set by itself in a small lank lawn near where the road crossed a stream. Beyond the bridge the lane twisted steeply up. She got off her bike to push, but instead of starting up the slope she stood looking at the house, thinking.

She waited for a few minutes and then squelched along its muddy driveway and rang the doorbell. The bell was a neat electric box, and the door, like the window frames, was painted a trendy shade of rustic teal. A set of bamboo wind chimes hung near by. When no one answered, she poked the letterbox open and saw a spreading puddle of post on the mat within.

She did a circuit around the house. Now that she was looking properly, all the details reeked of suburban affluence: wheelie bins with the name of the cottage painted on them, an elaborate squirrelproof bird feeder, a water butt attached to the downpipe from the gutters. Through a back window she saw vermilion cushions piled on a cream sofa. She knew from magazines and TV programs that they weren't merely cushions: they were accents of bold color. She was fairly certain that the only people who put accents of bold color in isolated cottages in obscure valleys on the Somerset–Devon borders were people who actually lived somewhere else.

She wasn't sure how much farther it was to the nearest village or town. Anyway, she was exhausted, and so was her supply of money.

Iggy had always been the bad one. Iggy flouted school rules for the sake of it and dared their friends to steal nail polish from Boots. Iggy grew her own pot. Iz felt she was about to cross into territory completely alien to her. She remembered her husband harrumphing at the TV news:
What would it be like if everyone decided to carry on like that? Do these people ever stop to think about that?
There was a terra-cotta strawberry pot outside the back door, by the wooden wellie rack and the ornamental iron coat hooks. As she picked it up, she answered him silently:
This is what it would be like, Nigel. Watch.

The shatter of glass was a surprisingly gentle sound, almost pretty. She used the base of the pot to clear splinters from the window frame. When she had a hole big enough, she went to get her bike from the road, threw the panniers in through the broken window, laid a wheelie bin down to use as a step, wrapped her hands in clothes, and climbed in. Most of the glass fragments had fallen on the sofa. She pushed it out of the way and kicked the rest of the broken window under it.

She went to the front door to inspect the pile of post. The oldest mailings were from mid-January, more than a month ago. At the end of the school holidays these people had packed up and left. They'd tidied up, unplugged everything, put things in cupboards. She found food, wood, matches. There was no electricity but she'd seen a propane tank outside, and they'd left the instructions for the boiler in a purple ring binder labeled
boiler—­instructions.
There was a flap you could open to light the pilot light with a match. It was all ridiculously easy.
Anarchy.
At the cost of one smashed window she was dry, she was sheltered, she could sleep comfortably. There was washing powder in a cupboard in the laundry room. She filled a bathtub with hot water and spent the next hour washing all her clothes, and then herself, in someone else's house.

• • •

In the morning she went through the cupboards more systematically. Some were locked, but the keys were all in a kitchen drawer, each tagged with string and a label telling her which door it opened. She found lots of things she knew by now would be useful: a flashlight, batteries, dishcloths, a balaclava, gloves, a penknife, toilet paper, a lightweight coat, and, best of all, maps. There was a strange pleasure in the way books tumbled onto the varnished wood floorboards when she pulled the maps from their shelves. Every disruption of the house's obedient aspirational tidiness felt like an apology offered to Gav.
I'm sorry I cared about things like this. I'm sorry I cared about my world instead of yours. Look.
She picked up a mug of pencils and tipped them over the floor as well.
I don't care anymore. See?
She rescued a couple of the pencils and snapped them before throwing them away again. She felt Gav smiling at her, like he used to in the days when he was still young and they went on expeditions together, before it all went wrong, so she went around the house looking for more things to break. She wrecked lightbulbs, clocks, a brushed steel barometer, family photos on bedside tables; the tables themselves, once she abandoned her stupid restraint and attacked them savagely enough.
Do you forgive me now, Gav? You'll let me stay with you now, won't you?

• • •

She didn't feel saddle-sore the next morning, for the first time. Drying herself after her bath the evening before, she'd studied herself in the mirror and thought she looked harder. The leg she'd cracked was still thinner than the other, but florets of muscle now bunched beneath its skin. She barely recognized herself.

• • •

The country was hummocks and hills again. Maps in hand, she abandoned the signed route and pressed on south and west as directly as the tangle of lanes allowed. Her panniers were heavily restocked and an icy drizzle blew against her on every ridge above every valley, but she went on steadily, knowing now that there were fewer miles ahead than behind. Late that afternoon she came to a hilltop junction where a bonfire had been lit in a field behind a roadside café. The building was dark and shuttered but its side door was open and there were voices inside, and from the field as well: woozy voices, laughter, and delirious wailing. She hid her bike farther down the road and waited for darkness. Under its cover she walked back to the building and slipped inside. Within was the stench of spilled alcohol and the sweet reek of pot, and scattered blankets and bodies, four or five people sleeping or passed out under long tables. She found a corner to occupy. No one noticed her in the dimness, or if they did no one cared. More people arrived from somewhere as evening became night. The dance and sputter of firelight outside grew more vigorous. She heard tambourines, and more voices, shaky, glittering. She slept and woke alternately, or thought she did. Certainly she thought she was awake when she cloaked herself in someone's rough blankets and went out to watch the revelers in the field, all young, winding in and out of each other around the heat of the fire, dancing and chanting and rutting. Their eyes were glassy, their smiles limp; if they knew she wasn't one of them, they never showed it, not even when she came right into the swaying throng. They whooped, sang, spun, fell over, dodging around her like a school of clumsy fish. A dark and antlered man walked among them, his hooved feet stepping to keep time with an invisible drum. She thought he carried a golden staff with a tip of horn, and touched it gently to the heads of the dancers as they passed him, or pressed it against the lips of those who lay drugged and drunken in the grass.