The Bunker Diary (14 page)

I’ve been watching the clock.
I’ve been sitting down at the dining table with my hands resting on my knees,
keeping my eyes on the clock, watching the second hand, tapping a finger in time to the
seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six … I just keep tapping, looking at
the clock, looking away, tapping, tapping, counting the time in my head … one,
two, three, four, five, six … until I get it right. What you have to do is
count quite slowly and add the word
thousand
to every second. One,
thousand … two, thousand … three, thousand. If you practise long
enough you can measure the time pretty accurately.

For the last few days I’ve been counting
the seconds, mentally keeping track of the minutes and hours. I’ve been checking
my
time against the
clock
time.

That’s how I know He’s messing
with the time.

It’s quite subtle. He slows it down or
speeds it up very gradually. For example, on Monday afternoon I started timing things at
two o’clock. By four o’clock
my
time, the clock on the wall said
3.45. OK, no big deal. I could have been wrong. But three hours later, three of
my
hours later, when it should have been 6.45, the clock said 5.55. And
there’s no way I’d miscalculated by that much. The clock on the wall was
definitely slowing down. And as the evening passed, it got slower and slower.

Midnight came two hours late.

I carried on counting throughout the
night.

Now
that
was really hard. I kept
getting sleepy, disorientated, number blind. I kept losing it. But in the end I’m
sure I kept a fairly accurate count. And I’m sure that the morning came two hours
early.

It did.

I know it did.

I felt really pleased with myself for a
while, like I’d caught Him out. I’d sat down and used my head and worked out
what He was doing. I’d put one over on Him. Ha! Good for me. Linus the genius. The
Greatest Thinker in the World. But then I thought –
Yeah, so you found out
what’s He’s doing. So what? It doesn’t change anything, does it?
It doesn’t get you anywhere. I mean, what are you going to do about
it?

I thought about that for a while, but I
didn’t get very far, so I went to see Russell and told him all about it.

‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘Positive. Sometimes He speeds it up
and other times He slows it down. There’s no set pattern. He does it at different
times and at different rates, but He’s definitely doing it.’

‘Well, well …’ Russell
said.

His face is getting thinner by the day. His
skull seems to have shrunk, the skin sucked in like a dried-up balloon. The only part of
him that isn’t shrinking is his teeth.

He looked at me. ‘What do you think it
means?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why
I’m asking you.’

He smiled. ‘I thought you said
you’d read my book.’

‘I have.’

‘Do you remember the chapter about
time?’

‘Yeah. Well, sort of. It was a bit
hard to understand.’

He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Early on in
the chapter I mention a man called St Augustine. Ring any bells?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘Augustine of Hippo. He was a North
African philosopher and theologian, one of the world’s most influential thinkers
on the nature of time. Many centuries ago he was asked the question, “What
is
time?” And his reply was, “If no one asks me, I know; but if
any person should require me to tell him, I cannot.”’

Silence.

I looked at Russell, expecting him to go on,
but he just sat there staring at the floor. I didn’t know if he was deep in
thought, falling asleep, or waiting for me to say something. I hoped he wasn’t
waiting for me to say something, because I didn’t have anything to say. What was
there to say? I mean, some old African guy tricks his way out of answering a difficult
question … so what?

Anyway, I gave it a few moments, then said,
‘Right … I see.’

Russell raised his head.
‘Doesn’t help much, does it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘all you
have to remember is that time doesn’t pre-exist. It’s a manufactured
quantity.’ He paused, breathing deeply, as if the act of speaking had tired him
out. ‘The clock on the wall is nothing. It relates to nothing. It’s just a
machine …’

His voice trailed off and he put his hand to
his head.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked
him. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing.’

‘Really –’

‘No, not
really
,’ I
said. ‘You’re sick. You’ve been getting worse ever since you got here.
Why don’t you tell me about it? I might be able to help.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘How do you know? I might have secret
healing powers.’

I don’t know why I said that. It was
meant to be a joke, I suppose. But it wasn’t funny. It was an ultra-moronic thing
to say.

He forced a smile to his face. ‘Can
you keep a secret?’

I nodded.

‘I don’t want the others to
know. Promise?’

‘Yeah, I promise.’

He took a deep breath, then sighed.
‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘I don’t have AIDS.
Not that it would matter if I did, of course. Well, it would … but I think you
know what I mean.’

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

‘It’s a brain tumour,’ he
said simply. ‘A primary brain tumour. Grade-four astrocytoma. I get very bad
headaches …’

I didn’t know what to say.

I said, ‘Oh.’

Russell just looked at me.

‘What’s going to happen?’
I said.

‘Well, the position of the
tumour …’ He put his hand to his head. ‘It’s here, deep within
the brain. Surgery is too hazardous. The risk of damage is too high.’

‘What kind of damage?’

‘Major damage. Partial paralysis, loss
of speech …’

I’m not sure what happened to me
then. I went a bit funny. As Russell carried on talking to me, telling me all about his
tumour, my mind began to shift. I felt weirdly out of place, awkward and uncomfortable,
too close, too far away, too young …

I can still feel it now.

I’m listening to him, but in a
strange, disconnected kind of way. You know, when you’re listening to somebody and
your mind starts drifting away? I hear the words he’s saying, but they’re
triggering the wrong things in my head. Like when he says
partial paralysis.
Just for a second I thought he said
Corporal
Paralysis – Major Damage, Corporal
Paralysis – and in the same instant an image flashed into my mind, the cover of an old
comic book. The comic was
Sergeant Fury
. Dad’s favourite. He’s got
loads of old comics. He loves them. Collects them. War comics, superheroes, all the old
Marvel comics. I used to read them all the time when I was a kid. I know them off by
heart. I know all the covers. I can see them in my mind.

This time though, instead of seeing Sergeant
Fury in my
mind, gritting his teeth and heroically hurling a
hand-grenade, I see this decrepit old black man slumped against a bombed-out tank. His
eyes are shocked white and his head is shrinking and a loose-helmeted medic is crouched
down beside him, saying, ‘The position of the tumour … here, deep within
the brain … surgery is too hazardous. The risk of damage is too
high …’

‘Linus?’

‘Dad?’

‘No, it’s me. Russell. Are you
all right?’

I looked up, my head suddenly clear again.
‘You’ve got cancer?’

‘A brain tumour, yes.’

‘Is it curable?’

He shrugged. ‘With the best treatment
possible I might have another year or so, maybe less. But down here, without medication,
who knows? It could be a month, two weeks …’

The room fell silent. Our eyes met for a
moment, and in that moment I knew he’d be dead very soon.

I said, ‘Is there anything I can
do?’

He shook his head. ‘I need
painkillers, steroids. I’ve asked for them, put them on the shopping
list –’

‘He won’t give you
anything.’

‘No.’

‘Is it getting worse?’

‘Some days are better than
others … some days …’ His voice faded, and I thought for a moment
he was dozing off again, but then he took a deep breath, straightened up, and smiled at
me. ‘Hey, now,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so glum. It’s not as
bad as all that. Just think of it as a change of timescale. That’s what I do. You
see, if you take a line, a world line, a lifeline if you like …’

He chatted away about different dimensions and
relativity and stuff for a while, but I couldn’t concentrate.

I was too depressed.

He’s right though. About time. The
clock on the wall
is
nothing. It’s just a machine that makes three bits
of metal go round in a circle. The Man Upstairs isn’t messing with time,
He’s just messing with a machine. The only thing the clock affects is the accuracy
of the dates in this diary. That’s why I got mixed up when Bird arrived. I’d
thought it was a Monday when he got here, but he said The Man had got him on his way
home from work the day before, which I’d thought was a Sunday, which didn’t
make sense. But it probably wasn’t a Monday after all. It was probably a Tuesday,
or even a Wednesday.

God knows what’s happened since then.
How many days have I lost? Or gained? For all I know, today could be Wednesday, or
Monday, or Thursday. But, like I said, what does it matter? Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday … they’re only words, they don’t have any real meaning.
Down here is down here. A day is a day. The time is now. That’s all there is to
it.

Things are beginning to get back to normal.
Bird and Anja have got over their hangovers and got used to not smoking again.
They’re both still edgy and snappy all the time, but it’s a controlled
edginess now. It’s not so spiky.

Fred’s up and about again. He
doesn’t look too bad. A bit hollow-eyed, a bit twitchy, but that’s about
all. He seems to have got over the withdrawal symptoms a lot quicker than last time. I
don’t really know how heroin works or what it does to your body, but I guess it
didn’t take him so long this time because he hadn’t been taking it that
long.

The rota’s creaking back into
operation too. The place is getting cleaner and it doesn’t stink of cigarette
smoke any more. We’re still not talking very much, but at least everyone’s
sober and straight.

Normal.

Here’s a normal day.

07.00: I wake up sweating. It’s too
hot. Sometimes He turns up the temperature at night. Other times He turns it down and I
wake up shivering, but this morning it’s too hot. I lie in bed thinking. Thinking
of other times, when I was a little kid, when Dad was at home, when Mum was …

Angry.

I always remember her angry. Angry or
irritable. Or both.

I remember the garden too. The garden of the
house we lived in before Dad got rich. The scrubby lawn, the hedge, the crumbling
rockery, the fir trees … I can see it all, as clear as a bright-blue sky. At
the far end of the garden there are two tall fir trees and a hedge of thick green
privet. Wood pigeons call from the fir trees – hoo
hoo
hoo, hoo
hoo … hoo
hoo
hoo, hoo hoo. I remember the hedge as a jungle. I
remember summer. Slow-worms are resting in the sand and roots of the hedge. Slow-worms.
Sleek brown tubes with skins of varnished leather. I sit cross-legged in the hedge-dirt
watching them. They’re not worms, they’re not even snakes. I know that
because I read my animal books. Slow-worms are legless lizards. They have hidden nubs of
arm and leg bones to prove it. I sit in the dirt, scratching my arse, absently crumbling
a clod of earth in my fingers, watching the slow-worms, and I remember Dad’s
joke.

Q: Why did the viper vipe ’er
nose?

A: Because the adder ’ad ’er
’andkerchief.

I remember Dad’s mouth, his smile, his
straight white teeth. His bristly moustache. And I sit here in the dirt, rubbing the
palm of my hand on my knee, singing a whispered song to myself (to the tune of
‘Three Blind Mice’): ‘
Hell-o Slow, hell-o Slow, what do you know,
what do you know …
’ – rocking back and forth like a praying mantis –
‘…
what do you know, Mis-ter Slow, what do you know, where do
you … GO!
’

And on the word
GO!
I make a grab
for one of the slow-worms, but I’m not quick enough.

I was never quick enough.

All I ever got was a handful of leaves and
dirt.

08.00: the light comes on and my memories
fade. I get out of bed and dress in my tattered clothes. Big T-shirt, padded shirt,
hood, baggy pants, getting baggier by the day. Hi-Tec boots. I go to the bathroom, wash,
clean my teeth, slip the sheet over my head and use the lavatory. I walk back down the
corridor, nod a silent greeting to Anja as she passes by the other way, and go into the
kitchen. Make coffee. Sit down, wait for the lift to arrive.