One (5 page)

He felt himself clench inside that he had not always done as his son asked. Little things, really. But important to Stanley, which should have mattered more at the time. He could have stroked his hair, slept with him until morning, but there was always a perceived crisis elsewhere.

He had always believed he carried childishness in him, that he had never truly grown up, but the opposite was the case. He was all too quick to finish the game, pack away the toys, curtail the rough and tumble. There was always something else that needed doing. And now he was near death and his boy was 500 miles away. It pierced him to think there would be no more hide-and-seek or piggyback rides.

Perhaps there had been footage of the storm on the TV and Cherry was either shielding him from it or gleefully pointing out that had Jane found a job on a building site in London Daddy wouldn't be in trouble.

Stanley in the corridor, putting out a hand to the wall to steady himself. His voice shattered by fear. 'Dad? Dad? I'm scared.'

'It's all right, Stan,' Jane said. 'I'm with you.'

3. DEAD CLADE WALKING

He was thinking about beaches on the west coast of France. Long and white and narrow like ivory letter-openers. Stanley no more than six months old, sitting in the sand with a large floppy cricket hat casting a broad shadow. Cherry snoozing on her back in a black bikini, skin shining with sun cream. The heat pressing people into the ground. A blanket and some baguettes, some cheese. A jar of anchovies. Christ, he had been mad for anchovies that summer. A bottle of Muscadet in a cool bag. The air thin and baked, stripping the throat dry. Sweat dried as soon as it escaped the pores. He had watched the sea for a long time, that strange illusion of the horizon seeming to rear up higher than the leading edge of the tide, as if it was a wall of water. He had been wishing he could go diving in water like that, instead of the cloudy, frigid swill of the North Sea.

He remembered the Gulf of Mexico and the fish that came to ogle him while he trained in the clear warm sea. When was that . . . '93? '94? He had worked with a guy called Erubiel, a Mexican from Lagos de Moreno who had not wanted to take over his father's dairy. The smell of milk made him sick. He just wanted to dive and then watch girls on the beaches of Pensacola during his time off. Erubiel was a good diving buddy, if a little hot-headed. He was methodical when it came to checking Jane's gear, but when it came to his own, he trusted to God. 'I drive carefully when I carry a passenger,' he said. 'When I'm on my own? Safety?
Chupame la verga
.'

Erubiel used to tap Jane on the head whenever he wanted his attention. He did it all the time. Tap, tap, tap. He was doing it now. And that was funny, because Erubiel had ended up in a wheelchair. Jane had received a postcard from his father a couple of years later when Jane had been building a reputation with his burning gear on drilling rigs near the Shetlands. There had been an accident on a rig in Campeche Sound. A gas leak. A dozen men had died. Erubiel leapt from the rig and the drop crushed his spine. Now he could sit and watch girls all day, but that was pretty much all he could do.

Tap, tap, tap.

Pack it in, Ruby. Give it a rest
.

Jane opened his eyes. His head was slapping against the edge of the chair. But it was more rhythmical now, less violent. Gone was the arbitrary shearing of deep-sea currents, a sickening, jolting pitch and yaw. This was a shallow-water beat. This was land ahoy.

He scrabbled for the harness release and tumbled out of his chair to the floor, which was now the portside wall. He couldn't see anything out of the porthole there; starboard was the queasy flux of the sky. But at least the howling had stopped. He staggered through the ruins of the boat, remembering to snatch up the green First Aid box. His legs felt as though they might pitch him into the slough of filth beneath him; he was grateful to have become inured to the stench hours ago. Hours. How long had he been asleep? How long had he drifted? He checked his watch. Midday. 7th December. Five days since he and his crew had lumbered back to the diving bells, panic at their heels. Where had that time gone? He must have spent most of it unconscious. He checked the gauge on the oxygen tanks and jammed the regulator back in his mouth. Hunger and thirst slapped him around the face while he struggled to spin open the hatch wheel. Steak and eggs and fried potatoes and a pint of best bitter. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves. A last look out of the porthole. He jerked up the hood on his coverall, readjusted his diving mask and pushed open the door.

It took a long time to get used to the still ground. For a while Jane trudged around on the beach where he had fetched up, the uncertainty of his tread in the sand a weird kind of comfort, a training ground for his balance. Part of his hanging around near the boat was down to his not being sure where he was. He didn't know if this was the UK, or Norway, or Nova Scotia. He didn't know what to do. The brutality of the wind on the oil platform had not followed him here, but it was still rough. It was hot, too, like the blast you got when you opened an oven to check the pizzas weren't burning.

He hid his face from the squalls of rain, but occasionally some of it would bite him and he'd have to swipe it away quickly with his gloved hands before it started to burn. Holes began to appear in the latex. He discarded them quickly. What the fuck was this? What the fuck had happened?

After a while spent scanning an horizon that resembled more the jag of an oscilloscope reading, Jane scrambled up an embankment of brown grass. The land appeared to have been sanded back to polished lava. He couldn't see much once he'd breasted the rise; a mist clung to the headland, erasing all but the darkest shadows of the near coast in both directions. He could see a road though, and he hurried towards it. British tarmac, he was sure. He felt a pulse of optimism. He was on home turf, at least. He got onto the road and saw a car parked half a mile to the north, slewed across both lanes as if it had braked suddenly, and hard. He trotted gamely towards it – UK number plate, which was a boon of sorts – but gradually his speed faltered as he saw the passengers. Both had attempted to get out of the car. One had succeeded but was lying on his back about ten feet away, a mousse of lung tissue and blood streaked across his face and shirt. His companion was still buckled in, although the strap had disappeared into the soufflé of her flesh. Her eyes drilled into him, poached, piscine. Her hand was a lobster claw hooked into the catch of the door. Both of them glittered like pixie-dust confections. The woman's head was jerking in the fierce slaps of wind, her charred hair jinking on a red-raw scalp like a fright wig. The tyres of the car had melted into the road. So whatever had killed his colleagues on the platform had done for these too. Not isolated, then. So, what? Nuclear? Was this a nuclear attack? Was this chemical warfare? Was this biological?

Jane reached into the car, hands shaking, and tried not to look at the woman any more. He was glad of his face mask, that he didn't have to smell her. He turned the key, but, as he expected, there was no response from the engine. Backing away, he swung his gaze north, wondering if he should head up to Aberdeen, but his initial impulse was to find immediate shelter, maybe a phone that still worked. Maybe a car or a motorbike. He followed the road south and his heart lifted to find a row of pretty cottages behind a bluff of land. A small harbour with a surrounding stone wall. Small boats had become driftwood. There were bodies in there too, face down. He wasn't sure if he should be grateful for that.

At the first of the stone cottages, he peered through the window, but there was nobody to be seen. He knocked on the door and the sound startled him. The skin on the back of his hands was striated, as if he had thrust it into a bed of thorns. Nobody was coming to answer. It didn't matter how many doors he tried. He rested his forehead against the blistered wood for a second. Closed his eyes. He went around the side of the house to the back. He climbed over the fence into a neatly tended garden. The lawn was a fried brown square. Washing on a line was pitted and scorched. A man was on his knees, toppled over against a chimney pot that contained a plant now little more than a few black tongues. The man's left hand was distended; blood had flowed and dried around the vanishing tourniquet of a watch strap. His fingers were purple, swollen and shiny like baby aubergines. Attached to a kennel by a chain, a peeled thing with too many teeth lay on its side, flanks scorched down to purple bone.

Jane strode past the man and pushed open the back door. The kitchen was halved by light that no longer existed. Whatever had torn across the coast had left an impression of itself here, like the discoloration that sunshine creates on the cover of a forgotten book on a windowsill, only much, much more swiftly. The dining table was a duotone of caramel and coffee. The plastic jug of a fruit-juicing machine had turned into a molten Dali nonsense. Envelopes on the table showed him where he was: Burnmouth, Berwickshire, which he knew to be a good 200 miles south of Aberdeen.

He moved through the house, checking each room, but he didn't know what he was seeking. He saw the shape of a child's bed in a room painted blue but did not dare look inside. Something wrong with whoever lived here. Inhalers and gas cylinders and endotracheal tubing. Tube holders like dog muzzles. Rows of medicines. Bleak textbooks. Volumes of hope.

On a table in another bedroom lay a book of photographs. Smiling faces. Oblongs of love protected by cellophane. A wasting girl in a white hospital gown. Eyes weighted with dark underscores. A smile fought for.

He checked with his fingers for the photographs of Stanley in his wallet but could not bring himself to produce them. It was enough to know they were there.

He felt a moment of mild panic when he thought of his parents. They were in their seventies, living in an industrial town in the north-west. Both were succumbing to the kind of low-level health problems that had increased the number of pillboxes in their bathroom cabinet and visits to the GP's surgery. Both had talked to him, casually, almost in passing, of what he should do if and when. They had set up a trust fund for Stanley. Ash in a vault, now, perhaps. He suddenly felt that he ought to go to them first; they were nearer, they were his parents. Whatever had burned this part of the east coast might have been pegged back by the Pennines. But no – Stanley had to be his priority. Either his parents were alive, or they were dead. He couldn't think that way of his little boy. Stanley had survived this. He must go to him.

There was a bookshelf in the hallway. Volumes about birds of prey. A plate of keys. Maps. He sifted through them and found the village. At the top of the cliffs overlooking the harbour, the East Coast Main Line railway and the A1 ran parallel to each other, south along the Berwickshire coast.

He picked up a phone and put it to his ear but he was no longer listening. Downstairs he opened the refrigerator and checked the contents. Everything was spoiled. He picked through the tins in the cupboard and put some of them in his rucksack. He wanted to spit out the regulator; the synthetic sound of his own breath was a constant reminder of how close he was to losing it. It was too early to see if the ambient air was breathable, but he would have to find fresh tanks soon or prepare himself for an experiment.

Jane went back outside and broke the lock on the shed. Inside he found pricking pots containing seeds that would never come on, a couple of poorly maintained gardening tools and a metal box filled mainly with Rawlplugs and drill bits whitened by masonry. A dusty table with thin legs bore a pile of papyrus-dry Sunday supplements and a coffee cup with the legend
No. 1 Grandpa
. There was a bicycle with dribbling tyres. In a drawer he found a combination lock, a bottle holder and a bracket, and an anti-pollution mask with a packet of replacement filters. He pocketed these and stared at the shelves on the wall, the tools on the shelves. Nothing of any use. Nothing he knew how to use well enough to make it useful. He stared through the cracked, foxed window into the garden, and the dog and the man were softened to a point where they might still be alive. The man finishing off a little work on his hosta; the dog stretched out, enjoying a snooze. If he stayed here long enough maybe he could will the world back into true. Going back outside could only lead to more awful discoveries.

He closed the door and stood in the lane. He kept thinking of the man in the garden.
No. 1 Grandpa
. He imagined a daughter and her child coming to visit and finding him like that, roasted to the bone. He went around the side of the house to the garden and retrieved a spade from the shed. He dug a grave. It took a long time. By the end of it he was sweating so much he could not get a sense of his own skin. His breath churned through the regulator; perspiration pooled in his diving mask.

He dragged the old man to the lip of the hole and drew him into it as gently as he could. He hesitated, the spade in his hand, before arranging the dog alongside him. Then he filled in the hole and smoothed the earth flat with the blade. He stared at his work, his raw fingers gripping the ash timber handle. He felt eyes on him, a heat on his shoulders, but when he turned the windows were empty. Just the eyes of the house then. Just the enormity of what had happened, massing.

Jane walked along the front of the other cottages, cupping his hands to the glass where it wasn't broken in order to see inside. Only in the last house in the line did he see anybody in the living room, a woman in an armchair, her body swollen into it as if she were a pile of badly fitted cushions. Her head was tilted back so he could only see the inverted V of her chin. He left the street and walked past a small roofed bus shelter and a red postbox on a wooden pole. He began the long steep ascent of the road to Upper Burnmouth and concentrated on his boots, one foot in front of the other. He had not eaten for some time. Fainting here might be the last thing he ever did.