Bar None (8 page)

So I walked, and watched, and listened, and as I reached the gate that led into the next field I saw an auburn blur to my left.

The fox must have been on the other side of the thick hedge, walking out into the gateway just as I approached. It saw me instantly, and probably heard and smelled me as well, but I've always been certain that until that moment it had been unaware of me. Maybe it had mirrored my route on the other side of the hedge. Perhaps it had paused when I paused to examine a rabbit hole, its own thoughts more basic than mine: food, meat, the chase and the catch. Then when I started again so did the fox, drawing closer to the gate that would reveal us to each other without a fear in its head. Foxes were always cautious, I knew that, especially during the day when there were farmers with shotguns and dogs. But they also had families that needed feeding. And like the farmers that despised them so, the foxes worked the land to find that food.

It felt like several minutes that we stood there staring, daring each other to make a move. I've never felt time distorted to such an extent. Whenever I look back I cannot honestly say how long we remained on either side of the open gate. I saw the fox's fur rise on its back when a breeze sang up the hillside, and a heartbeat later my fringe lifted in sympathy. Its eyes glittered. Its mouth hung open slightly, and I saw the pink tongue in there, moist and shiny as it moved ever so slightly, stretching and contracting with each fast breath. One of its ears twitched and I turned my head slightly, looking down into the fox's field to see whether there was anything else moving in there. Nothing. No cows or sheep, no farmer or hikers, no rabbits or birds. A couple of butterflies danced frantic patterns in the morning sunlight a dozen paces away, and in that moment of utter stillness and clarity of vision I fancied I could hear their delicate wings singing at the air. I saw corn shift as the sky let out its held breath, and I could almost smell it moving, sense the shifting of balance all around me as the landscape—living, breathing, watching and sensing—moved moment to moment.

I was not holding my breath. My heart pumped faster than usual, and I could hear blood flowing in my ears, but I breathed normally, long calm breaths which I hoped the fox could hear.
Stay with me
, I thought, desperate for the moment to never end.

Perhaps I spoke it. Maybe in that moment of epiphany I forgot myself, and muttered to the creature as though it were my own kind. The fox darted away down the field, keeping low and tight to the hedge leading off at right angles from the one I had followed, and within seconds all I could see of it was the occasional twitch of a corn stalk as it passed by. A few seconds more and it was gone, into the next field or the copse of trees two hundred meters down the hillside. I would likely never see it again.

For a while nature came alive around me. Birds sang, things scurried through the hedgerow, and to my left I saw the grey smudge of several rabbits emerging from their burrows. Then I turned and sighed, and that bubble of cautionary silence fell once again.

For a moment I had been a part of it all. I never forgot that feeling, and I never once experienced it again.

Everything changed that day. I became a watcher, able to appreciate what I saw for the stunning miracle it was. That was not just a robin on our bird feeder, it was a living, thinking thing, filled with instinct and blessed with its own personality, more complex and wonderful than anything mankind had ever achieved in its short history on the planet. We may have landed men on the Moon, but the creation of life was way beyond us. We explored space, the continents, the oceans, while the inner-space of our own minds remained largely unknown. For a moment, staring at that fox, I had known my place in things.

Later that day, drinking yet another bottle of Old Empire with Rob and Clive, I looked out across the fields and experienced a brief shred of total understanding at the way things worked. And though that instant terrified me so much that Clive dropped his beer and asked what was wrong, it also gave me a sense of peace that lasted most of a lifetime.

I swerve wide around a burnt-out wreck in the middle of the road, see the deer standing on the tarmac a hundred meters away, lean the other way to avoid it, over-compensate, and feel the bike slipping away from me. My hand turns the throttle as I fall and the engine screams, wheels throwing up a haze of smoke as rubber burns. I let go of the handlebars and wrap my arms around my head. In those couple of seconds between losing control and striking the ground, I realise how casual I have already become about what we are doing.

If I break a leg now, there is no hospital to go to, no doctor to set the bone, no antibiotics readily available. Only pain and suffering. I'll probably die.

I am travelling at less that fifteen miles per hour, but it's fast enough to kill me if I land wrong.

I hit the ground on my left side, skid, feel the bike go out from under me and slide on ahead, and then I begin to roll. I go over and over several times, taking the impacts on my elbows and knees, my back and hips. I come to a halt resting against the deflated tyres of a blue car, and I remain motionless.
If it hurts when I move, I could be in big trouble
.

I hear the motorbike stall as it scrapes to a halt. I open my eyes and peer between my elbows, and of course the deer is gone.

The sound of the Range Rovers' engines change and footsteps come toward me. I roll onto my back. Someone groans and I think,
Is that them? Are they groaning at what they see of my face?
But then I realise that the groan has come from me, and I let my arms drops away to my sides.

Jacqueline is first by my side, eyes darting left and right as she looks for blood or the white of broken bones. Her face relaxes as she sees neither, and she leans in and touches my face. "Are you hurt?" The others are there then, crowding around with matching looks of concern.

"Pride badly dented," I say.

"Gave me a fucking heart attack," the Irishman says. He grins down at me, lights a cigarette and looks around, as though keeping watch.

I sit up slowly, waiting for pain to kick in from cracked ribs or chipped elbows. But I've been lucky. I can feel the trickle of blood running down my left sleeve, and my trousers are torn at the knees, but I don't think there's any lasting damage. I should feel petrified, but I don't. I'm exhilarated. I'm like a speed junkie who's just had his first fix for a long time.

Something calls out from the woods to the north, a long, low moan the likes of which I've never heard before. The Irishman frowns, looks down at me, and I shrug.

"What was that?" Jessica asks.

"Fox," the Irishman says. "They can sound like babies screaming when they mate."

"Doesn't sound like a fox to me," Jessica says.

"Did you see the deer?" I ask. "It was just standing in the middle of the road. Just stood there staring at me as I came toward it, as though it knew I'd fall off."

"Didn't see a deer," Cordell says. He's gazing off across the fields, waiting for the fox—or whatever it is—to call again.

Jacqueline looks at me, touching my face, holding my hand as I go to stand.

"Is the bike okay?" the Irishman asks. It has skidded along the road, leaving white scratched streaks across the tarmac, and I sniff as we approach, expecting petrol. But it seems that the old motorbike is as hardy as me; apart from some bumps and scrapes it's in good working order. I mount it, roll forward a few feet, and smile when it kicks to life first time.

"So let's go," I say.

"But carefully," Jessica says. "We can't waste time having to bury you." She turns away without smiling and passes Cordell, where he still stands staring over the fields toward the woods.

"Didn't sound like a fox to me," Cordell says.

By the time we all gathered at the Manor there was nothing on TV or radio other than three automatic broadcasts. One radio channel played a warning to "Remain in your house with all doors and windows closed" on a continuous loop that became maddening after thirty seconds. The only TV picture was a blank screen with the words "Hold for a speech from the Prime Minister." We held for a while, then turned it off. The final radio broadcast, which one or the other of us turned on quite often before it suddenly ended three weeks after the plagues, played "Wonderful World" over and over again. Before the end of the world, that song never failed to make me cry. Afterward, Louis Armstrong's grizzled voice and wondrous lyrics inspired melancholy rather than sadness. The thing was, from what I could see from the folly up behind the Manor, it still
was
a wonderful world, though one where humanity suddenly had so much less involvement.

From the very beginning, we had all been of one mind. The Manor was stocked with food and, more importantly, a cellar full of wine and beer. We could fight our way across the shattered landscape to here or there, but none of us had knowledge that hinted at anything better elsewhere. So the alternative course of action was to remain in the Manor and see what happened. Eat. Drink. Remember.

Even Jacqueline, who professed to hating the taste of real ale, enjoyed several bottles each night after our first week together.

It was not that we were trying to shut out reality by drowning it in alcohol. That wasn't it at all. It was simply that we had much better things to remember than what was happening to us there and then. The past was a happier place, and beer was a happy way to get there.

Except for Jessica. Maybe ten years older than me, she never gave a clue about what she had lost, who she had left behind. She never actually told me outright that there was no one, but I gleaned it from her eyes, her casual acceptance, and the fact that she seemed more content than any of us with her lot.

"It's a fine day when the end of the world comes, and all you have to do is drink beer," the Irishman said one night.

I agreed with him. "Real ale apocalypse," I said. He started giggling, I laughed, and the two of us stayed up drinking until the early hours, unable to talk through our tears.

We head off again and this time I drive slower, taking more care, edging past wrecked cars and watching out for debris on the road. And deer. I
did
see it, I know that, no matter that none of the others saw. It was there, staring me out and willing me to fall, and fall I did. So much must have changed.

But it's not only newly confident animals that pose a danger. There are plenty of broken branches and leaf slicks from the winter, and here and there something larger blots the way; half a bumper from a crashed car, a Wellington boot, a crash helmet with one side caved in. I pass by a beer barrel standing on its end, one side gashed open. Soon after that there's a full bathroom suite smashed across the road—sink, toilet, bath. It's old—the bath is cast iron—and the scum stains are still visible beneath winter's slime. There are no vans or lorries close by, nothing to explain what this bathroom is doing here. And I realise that this is now a world of mystery. Before the plagues—before the end—something like this could have been investigated. Perhaps the sanitary ware carried manufacturer's codes, or even labels saying where and when it was bought or fitted. Its owners could be tracked down, and an explanation offered as to why it had ended up smashed and strewn across a dual carriageway. Now, with everyone dead, knowledge is rarer than ever before. Mystery is the order of the day. It's a wilder world we lived in, one where there doesn't always have to be a reason.

I wonder what the conversation is turning to back in the Range Rovers. We've been housebound for six months, apart from a few short, hesitant trips beyond the Manor's boundaries. Now we have given up everything we had on the word of one man, a man who came and went in the blink of an eye. I've always been guilty of self-doubt, but now it crushes in, crowding me with images of Michael's face, teasing me. I remember his smile, his frown, the way his mouth turned up at the edges when he spoke, and I remember nothing of Ashley but the tears.

I wonder if he inspires such guilt in the others. I know so little about them, really, even though we have spent weeks drinking and talking and reminiscing over old times. I know details of their past and their memories, but so little about
them
.

The road remains quite clear for the next hour, and we only have to stop once for Jacqueline to nudge a wrecked car aside with her Range Rover. Its wheels scream as it is pushed across the tarmac, deflated tyres ripping apart like torn skin.

We crest a hill and see the stain of Newport on the countryside miles ahead, the M4 motorway a textured line two miles away, and we decide to stop for something to eat and drink. We park on the side of the road behind an overturned lorry. Its doors have been forced open and a drift of orange trays has fallen from inside. They used to hold wrapped loaves of bread, but the produce has long since turned black and hard.

We sit alongside each other on the crash barrier, facing away from the road, across the drainage ditch and up a steep hillside toward the wooded summit. The trees up there seem to have welcomed spring early this year, their leaves already forming a thick canopy that captures the sun. The hillside below them is spotted with a few dead cattle long since rotted to bone and hide. Previously trim hedges have exploded into the fields, daffodils are sprinkled across the hillside like a dusting of pollen, and here and there I see clumps of shoots springing from the ground. Size is difficult to judge without anything for comparison, but the shoots seem to be at least as tall as the dead sheep lying around them. I wonder what they are—not crop plants, for sure. Jacqueline hands me an opened tin of peach halves and I begin to eat.

"We'll have to camp somewhere," Cordell says. He looks at the sky. "Way past midday already. If the M4 is relatively clear we may make the Severn before we have to stop. I don't want to travel by night."

"Why not?" Jessica asks. She's unwrapping a smoked sausage, making sure we all have a fair share of everything.

"Don't know what's out here," he says. And he's right. We all know that, because none of us questions him.