If Then (32 page)

“Help Euan,” Ruth said. “Help him. He’s a little boy. Do not attach conditions to your help. Help him unquestioningly. For the principle of helping him.”

“I will not resort to principles.” He finished his soup and placed his spoon carefully on the edge of his bowl. “But watching you trying to do good is fascinating.”

She tried another tack.

“Why is Euan ill?”

“The manufacturing processes utilized to create the war game produces pollutants which have an adverse effect, particularly on children. His immune system is depressed because of shock and the absence of his parents. There’s no medical precedent for treating his exposure to these elements.”

“So how do we help him?”

“Trial and error would be our normal approach.”

“What if you make an error?”

“Error is highly likely. We will need a lot of sick boys if we are to discover a cure.”

Christopher behaved as if the Process spoke through him. But he was merely aping what he imagined the Process to be. To him, the teenage son of a cynic, human relationships were unsentimental bargains. Although his words were studded with the markers of reason, they were as riddled with wish fulfilment as the grotto Agnes had fashioned in the garden.

She cleared away the lunch and heated some rainwater for Euan. She would flush out his system. She told Christopher that if he wanted to help then he could go to Lewes and fetch the doctor. He took the remaining hot water to the bathroom, stripped naked to the waist, and shaved the bare isosceles triangle around his implant scar. He shouted for Ruth to come and see; when she entered, nonchalantly registering his torso, he gestured with the razor through the bathroom window toward the high ridge: black smoke was flowing over the ridge as if the war zone were a goblet of poison. The smoke and rain formed a dark whip that lashed the house and the wheat field in turn. A charred scrap of uniform was swirled up and pressed against the windowpane. Then the wind lashed it away.

His torso was smooth and hairless, and he tensed his stomach to create a flattering array of tensions.

“Will you go to Lewes for us?” she asked.

“I have to wait until the armour wants me.”

“You could just leave. Take the boy with you.”

“So he can die in my arms instead of yours?”

“Why are you here? What do you want from us?”

He feigned hurt. Or maybe he really meant it. His emotions were so immature it made no difference to her either way.

“I’m staying in the hope that the Process will use me to help you. I’m fascinated to discover if your kindness works.”

“Walk to Lewes and fetch the doctor. That would help us.”

He weighed up this suggestion.

“The doctor only prescribes what the Process tells him to.”

It was so maddening that there were people and technology around who could help, but would not.

“Please, Christopher. Go and fetch the doctor. It’s the right thing to do.”

“You don’t understand. It will all work out for the best if we just stick to our roles.”

She thought twice about striking him but did not want to risk his temper; instead, she slammed the bathroom door behind her.

S
he sat
up with Euan throughout the cold night, lifting his head now and again so that he could drink boiled rain water. The wind rattled the barbed wire coils against the floorboards, blew its dull music upon the chimney, and carried with it the smell of burning undergrowth fragranced with sage and thyme. She saw a lantern in the farmyard; Christopher was out monitoring the progress of the night convoys.

She had never asked James what it was like to be connected to the Process; was it a voice in his head, or a series of urges, like the cravings that drew him to the armour? Christopher seemed so different from her husband, and this was what made her suspect that each man influenced how the Process changed them. James had resigned himself to it, and used the forgetfulness it induced in him as a way of avoiding the moral consequences of being the bailiff. Christopher’s engagement was more active, and less docile; a collaboration almost, with one eye remaining human and the other eye immersed in calculation.

At Euan’s bedside, she drifted in and out of sleep, feeling her head nod loosely forward then jerking awake again. The lantern had vanished from the yard and there were footsteps on the landing. The children were already in her dreams; normally it took years for new friends or acquaintances to tunnel their way into the depths of her unconscious; such was the crisis of feeling around the children that they stood alongside James in her dream, all four of them trying to work out the right way home.

She awoke, startled by the sense of being observed. She opened the bedroom door. Christopher moped on the landing, shirtless, his skin wet with rain.

He looked frustrated. She knew that look.

“You want to make love to me, but you don’t know how to ask.”

“It’s what must happen,” he said.

She put her hand on his chest.

“Do you want me?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Because it will fulfil my role as the wife of the bailiff.”

The sensation of her fingers against his skin stirred his lust. It was a risk, to arouse him like this; after the implant, James’ lust manifested as a violent indignation that sex had been hidden from him.

Christopher said, “I want you because you are kind. And it might even help save the boy.”

He moved close to her.

She whispered, “We’re not going to bargain like in the old days.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to exchange sex for protection, do you understand?”

“I thought you wanted this.”

“If I wanted it, then I would ask for it.”

“The Process knows what’s best for you.”

“Would you rape me if the Process ordered you to?”

“It wouldn’t be rape. The Process knows what will make us both happy. Even if we won’t admit it to ourselves.”

“You’re not under the control of the Process, Christopher. The implant interferes with your sex drive and then all that suppressed energy breaks through at once. I want you to use that energy in a different way. To control the armour. James insisted he couldn’t. But you’re different. In some ways, stronger.”

He pulled her roughly to him, his breath upon her lips.

“No bargaining,” she said. “I don’t want to make love to you. We’re both still part of the Process. My happiness matters to it. You’re courting your own eviction.”

“You’re asking me to
want
, but refusing to give me the one thing that I want.”

“I want you to use the armour to take us through the convoys to Lewes. And then, I want you to break into the war zone and rescue my husband.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Begin with your desire for me. Take all that suppressed longing. And use it to control the armour.”

She left him on the landing, and went to check up on the children. They slept top to tail in a single bed. She unfolded a blanket upon the painted floorboards, and settled down alongside them.

T
he next morning
, she was woken by the sound of the armour’s engines turning over. She moved to the window. The armour turned its back on the house, and walked steadily through the squalling rain, down into the valley floor and back toward Saddlescombe. She ran barefoot across the muddy yard after the armour. She would not give up. Running alongside its heavy tread, each step throwing off cascades of liquefied earth, she shouted up at Christopher, called him a coward and a killer, promised him she would love him, if only he would help her then she would do anything he asked: all of that and more, she offered to him. But he was lost to the Process. He had no choice over the matter. He had no control. Oh, how foolish she had been, to believe he could be persuaded and that together they could take control of their lives! A higher gear engaged, the armour accelerated and it ran over the ridge, directly into the war, and she slipped down the slope and onto her knees.

What will you do?

All her adult life, she had been unable to answer that question. Was it her fault, that no good course of action seemed open to her? Was it her flaw that she could not see what needed to be done?

From over the ridge, the artillery resumed a steady bombardment. The valley side tremored. The rain seemed to flow uphill. And then, overhead, came the quick dark shape of a shell. She watched its trajectory in a terrible elongated second of apprehension.

The shell exploded in the farmyard. The windows of the farmhouse blew out as one, and black smoke poured steadily out of the hole.

She ran back to the farmhouse, her bare legs entirely sheathed in mud. Another shell, another dreaded trajectory, this time through the roof of the barn so that one side of it burnt fiercely. Although her instincts could sense the imminence of the next shell, she did not slow her pace but ran directly into the house, up the stairs, to the children’s bedroom. It was empty. From overhead, she heard a whining spinning cry, a howl of intent, the last thing the prey hears before the predator is upon them.

The floor and bed lifted up into the air. The ceiling plaster opened like a white mouth. She was suspended within the bedroom. The floorboards cracked and parted. The chimney stack withdrew. She found purchase, and pulled herself free of the cascade of masonry and dust, and ran back down the stairs with collapse at her heels. In the hallway, the coils of barbed wire lashed around, levered upward by the impact of the timber and bricks. The door to the cellar was open. She scampered on her hands and knees toward it, the barbed wire raking across her back, puncturing the skin, snagging her with pain. She would not give in. The cross beam of the ceiling splintered. She looked over her shoulder, yanked the barbs from her flesh. Screams from down below. The children were in the cellar. She had to be with them. It was all that mattered, at the end of the world, to give comfort. To mollify the brutality of creation.

Ruth closed the cellar door behind her. Agnes sat at the bottom of the stairs holding Euan’s limp body to her. Good girl, she thought, and she had just enough time to put her arms around the children before another tier of the house gave way.

H
aving fought so
hard to survive, she only wished she could live on with even half of that courage. The children tried to shift from under her. They both smelt strongly of fear. She could just reach Euan’s cheek with her fingertips. His head turned in response to her touch. How long had they been like this? She remembered being conscious of the pain in her back for a long time, but being unable to do anything about it.

“I can’t move,” she whispered.

Agnes shouted for help. She heard mice scamper in the rubble. The child shifted and Ruth tasted blood. The child was bleeding. They were crushed together into one scared, dying organism. Agnes screamed and shouted until she was hoarse.

“Please,” said Ruth. It hurt to speak. Her ribs were crushed. “Be quiet for a moment.” She had no strength left. If only she had died in the bombardment then she would have been spared this long slow death.

The children would die first, one by one, and then she would lie against their dead bodies for a day or two before she died. Would she go mad? No, she did not think so. There would be no mercy for her. And then she felt her thoughts fissure and branch, as on the point of sleep, and she realized that maybe death was not as far away as she thought.

Woken this time by the sound of shelling, nearer and nearer. Good. Let it end quickly. The burden of responsibility was lifted from her, and the dark place into which she had been cast was filled with light.

C
hristopher turns back
, sees the wrecked farmhouse in the rain. More shells arc over the ridge and explode in the grounds. Not too late to go back there. To help. To help himself.

The armour is his real body. Rust tears run down his blank face. He sobs with lust. Ruth had controlled the situation and helped him forget how easily he could have held her down with his iron claws. The farmhouse took a direct hit. If not dead, then dying.

He is the bailiff. He has a role to play. He does not save lives.

Lust is a distraction. He could visit the brothel again. The assemblers had remade the bar and changing rooms of Fulking Cricket Club, reconfigured it at a molecular level until it was a damp grotto. At the entrance, a line of manufactured men waited two-by-two for their turn, impassive faces under a red light. He had waited among them, implant fizzing with their conversation. And then it was time, and he went through the curtain, and discovered that one of the whores was a real woman. Afterward, she wanted saving too. Said the men at the front of the line just joined the back of the line, on and on it went. He promised to help her because he had just come and felt guilty about it.

The bailiff does not save lives. He evicts the unworthy. As his father said, “quality not quantity”.

Undulating golden waves of destiny flow over the Downs. The iron ring is molten. The black box and its shimmering black surface of code. He runs at twenty miles an hour towards the future, a meaningful exploration of human nature, and the possibilities open to him as part of the new order. Omega John is dying. Alpha Christopher is the future. The first of the new men.

He is thankful his mother lived to see him like this. When she was ill, he sat in his bedroom and thought about what it would be like if she died: he’d never able to show her all his success. Would winning mean anything to him if crazy old Edith didn’t witness it, show her approval with a proud smile and a tanned hand on her heart?

She helped him shaved his head for the implant, and, when the last of his hair curled in the sink, Edith ran her cool hands across his bare scalp, smiled silently and left.

He runs suffused with golden waves of destiny, distracted by the symbols shimmering and fluctuating within him. The iron ring splits at the base. The circle becomes an inverted pair of horns, the ends of which curl outward, become an omega symbol.