Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (2 page)

2

The summer the photograph was taken, my father recast our cellar as a fallout shelter. I don’t know if he discussed his plans with Oliver Hannington that June, but the two of them lay around the sunny garden, talking and smoking and laughing.

In the middle of the night, Ute’s music, melancholic and lilting, drifted through the rooms of our house. I would roll over in bed under my single sheet, sticky with the heat, and imagine her at the piano in the dark with her eyes shut, her body swaying, charmed by her own notes. Sometimes I heard them long after she had closed the key lid and gone back to bed. My father didn’t sleep well either, but I think it was his lists that kept him awake. I imagined him reaching for the pad of
paper and the small pencil stub he kept under his pillow. Without switching on the light, he wrote,
1. General list (3 people)
and underlined it:

       
Matches, candles

       
Radio, batteries

       
Paper and pencils

       
Generator, torch

       
Water bottles

       
Toothpaste

       
Kettle, pots

       
Pans, rope, and string

       
Cotton, needles

       
Steel and flint

       
Sand

       
Toilet paper, disinfectant

       
Bucket with a lid

The lists read like poetry, even though the handwriting was a boyish version of my father’s later frantic scribblings. Often the words strayed over each other where he had written them in the dark, or they were packed together as though tussling for space in his night-time head. Other lists sloped off the page where he had fallen asleep mid-thought. The lists were all for the fallout
shelter: essential items to keep his family alive under the ground for days or maybe even weeks.

At some point during his time in the garden with Oliver Hannington, my father decided to fit out the cellar for four people. He started to include his friend in the calculations for the quantity of knives and forks, tin cups, bedding, soap, food, even the number of toilet-paper rolls. I sat on the stairs, listening to him and Ute in the kitchen as he worked on his plans.

“If you must make this mess it should be for just the three of us,” she complained. There was the noise of papers being gathered. “I am uncomfortable that Oliver should be included. He is not one of the family.”

“One more person doesn’t make any difference. Anyway, bunk beds don’t come in threes,” said my father. I could hear him drawing while he spoke.

“I don’t want him down there. I don’t want him in the house,” Ute said. The scratch of pencil on paper stopped. “He is witching this family—it gives me the creepers.”

“Bewitching and creeps,” said my father, laughing.

“Creeps! OK, creeps!” Ute didn’t like to be corrected. “I would prefer that this man is not in my house.”

“That’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? Your house.” My father’s voice was raised now.

“My money has paid for it.” From my position on the stairs I heard a chair scrape against the floor.

“Ah yes, let us pray to the Bischoff family money that funds the famous pianist. And dear Lord, let us not forget how hard she works,” said my father. I could imagine him bowing, his palms pressed together.

“At least I am a professional. What do you do, James? Lie across the garden all day with your dangerous American friend.”

“There’s nothing dangerous about Oliver.”

“There is something not right with him, but you will not see it. He is only here to make trouble.” Ute stomped from the kitchen and went into the sitting room. I shuffled my bottom up a step, wary of discovery.

“What use will playing the piano be when the world ends?” my father called after her.

“What use will twenty tins of Spam be, tell me that?” Ute yelled back. There was a wooden clunk as she lifted the key lid, and she played one low minor chord with both hands. The notes died away and she shouted, “Peggy, she will not ever be eating the Spam,” and even though there was no one to see me, I hid my mouth behind my hand as I smiled. Then she played Prokofiev’s Sonata no. 7—fast and furious. I imagined her fingers sliding on the ivory like talons.

“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark,” my father bellowed.

Later, when I had crept back to bed, the arguments and the piano playing ended, but I heard other sounds, ones that sounded almost like pain, although, even aged eight, I knew they meant something else.

There was a list that mentioned Spam. It was on the one titled “5. Food etc.” Under the heading my father wrote, “15 calories per body pound, ½ gallon of water per day, ½ tube of toothpaste per month,” then:

       
14 gallons water

       
10 tubes toothpaste

       
20 tins condensed chicken soup

       
35 tins baked beans

       
20 tins Spam

       
Powdered eggs

       
Flour

       
Yeast

       
Salt

       
Sugar

       
Coffee

       
Crackers

       
Jam

       
Lentils

       
Dried beans

       
Rice

The items meander, as if my father played the “I went to the shops and bought . . .” game by himself—Spam reminded him of ham, which made him think of eggs, which took him to pancakes and on to flour.

In our cellar he laid a new concrete floor, reinforced the walls with steel, and installed batteries that could be recharged by pedalling a static bicycle for two hours a day. He fitted two cooking rings, running off bottled gas, and built alcoves for the bunk beds—all made up with mattresses, pillows, sheets, and blankets. A white melamine-topped table was placed in the centre of the room, with four matching chairs. The walls were lined with shelves, which my father stacked with food and jerrycans of water, cooking utensils, games, and books.

Ute refused to help. When I came home from school, she would say she had spent her day practising the piano, while “your father has been playing in the cellar.” She complained her fingers were stiff with neglect and her wrists ached, and that bending down to look after me had affected her posture at the keyboard. I didn’t question why she was playing more often than she used to.
When my father emerged from underneath the kitchen, his face red and his bare back shiny, he looked as though he might faint. He glugged water at the kitchen sink, put his whole head under the tap, then shook his hair like a dog, trying to make me and Ute laugh. But she only rolled her eyes and returned to her piano.

Each time my father invited members of the North London Retreaters to our house for meetings, I was allowed to open the front door and show the half-dozen hairy and earnest men into Ute’s sitting room. I liked it when our house was full of people and conversation, and until I was sent up to bed, I lingered, trying to follow their discussions of the statistical chances, causes, and outcomes of a thing they called “bloody Armageddon.” If it wasn’t “the Russkies” dropping a nuclear bomb and obliterating London with just a few minutes’ warning, it would be the water supply polluted by pesticides, or the world economy collapsing and the streets being overrun with hungry marauders. Although Oliver joked that the British were so far behind the Americans that when disaster came we would still be in our pyjamas while they would have been up for hours protecting their homes and families, my father was proud that his group was one of the first—perhaps the first—to meet in England
to discuss survivalism. But Ute was petulant about not being able to practise the piano with them lounging around, drinking and chain-smoking late into the night. My father loved to argue and he knew his subject well. When the alcohol had flowed for a few hours and all agenda items had been covered, the meetings would dissolve from well-ordered discussion to argument, and my father’s voice would rise above the others.

The noise would make me throw off my bedsheet and sneak downstairs in my bare feet to peep around the sitting-room door, where the odours of warm bodies, whisky, and cigarettes drifted toward me. In my memory, my father is leaning forward and thumping his knee, or stubbing out his cigarette so burning tobacco flies out of the ashtray and melts crusty holes in the rug or scorches the wooden floor. Then he is standing with his hands clenched and his arms held tight to his sides as if he is battling with the impulse to let his fists fly at the first man who stands up to disagree with him.

They wouldn’t wait for one another to finish speaking; it wasn’t a debate. Like my father’s lists, the men shouted over each other, interrupting and heckling.

“I tell you, it’ll be a natural disaster: tidal wave, flood, earthquake. What good will your shelter be then, James, when you and your family are buried alive?”

Standing in the hall, I flinched at the thought, my fists balled, and I held in a whimper.

“Flood? We could bloody do with a flood now.”

“Look at those poor buggers in that earthquake in Italy. Thousands dead.” The man’s words were slurred and he had his head in his hands. I thought perhaps his mother was Italian.

“It’ll be the government that lets us down. Don’t expect Callaghan to be knocking on your door with a glass of water when the standpipes have run dry.”

“He’ll be too busy worrying about inflation to notice the Russians have blasted us to hell.”

“My cousin has a friend at the BBC who says they’re producing public information films on how to make an inner refuge in houses. It’s just a matter of time before the bomb drops.”

A man with a greying beard said, “Frigging idiots; they’ll have nothing to eat and if they do the army will confiscate it. What’s the frigging point?” A bit of spittle caught in the hairs on his chin and I had to look away.

“I’m not going to be in London when the bomb falls. You can stay, James, locked in your dungeon, but I’ll be gone—the Borders, Scotland, somewhere isolated, secure.”

“And what will you eat?” said my father. “How will you survive? How are you going to get there with all
the other fools heading out of the cities as well? It’ll be gridlock and if you get to the countryside, everyone including your mother and her cat will have gone too. Call yourself a Retreater? It’ll be the cities where law and order are restored soonest. Not your commune in North Wales.” From behind the door frame, I swelled with pride as my father spoke.

“All those emergency supplies in your cellar are meant to be just that,” said another man. “What are you going to do when they run out? You don’t even have an air rifle.”

“Hell, give me a decent knife and an axe and we’ll be fine,” said my father.

The Englishmen carried on arguing until an American voice cut through them all: “You know what the trouble is with you, James? You’re so damn British. And the rest of you—you’re all living in the dark ages, hiding in your cellars, driving off to the country like you’re going on a fucking Sunday picnic. You still call yourself Retreaters; the world’s already moving on without you. You haven’t even figured out that you’re survivalists. And James, forget the cellar. What you need is a bug-out location.”

The way he spoke was authoritative, with an assumption of attention. The rest of the men, my father included, fell silent. Oliver Hannington lolled in the armchair with
his back to me, while all the others stared out the window or at the floor. It reminded me of my classroom, when Mr. Harding said something none of us understood. He would stand for minutes, waiting for someone to put their hand up and ask what he meant, until the silence grew so thick and uncomfortable that we looked anywhere except at each other or him. It was a strategy designed to see who would crack first, and nine times out of ten it would be Becky who would say something silly, so the class could laugh in relief and embarrassment, and Mr. Harding would smile.

Unexpectedly, Ute strode through from the kitchen, walking in that way she did when she knew she had an audience, all hips and waist. Her hair was tied in a messy knot at the back of her neck and she was wearing her favourite kaftan, the one that flowed around her muscular legs. Every man there, including my father and Oliver Hannington, understood that she could have gone the long way round, via the hall. No one ever described Ute as beautiful—they used words like striking, arresting, singular. But because she was a woman to be reckoned with, the men composed themselves. Those standing sat down, and those on the sofa stopped slouching; even Oliver Hannington turned his head. They paid attention to their cigarettes, cupping the lit ends and looking around for
ashtrays. Ute sighed: a quick intake of breath, an expansion of her ribcage and a slow exhalation. She berated the men as she walked past them to kneel in front of me. For the first time, my father and his friends turned and saw me.