The Bunker Diary (19 page)

Fred didn’t let go. He sat there for a
minute or so, drenched in sweat, still gripping the dog’s head, making absolutely
sure it was dead. Then, with a final sigh, he let go. The lifeless Dobermann slumped to
the floor, its head flopping loosely on its broken neck. Fred looked at it for a moment,
no expression in his eyes. Then he stood up, dragged the dead dog into the lift, and
threw it dismissively into the corner.

The others had come out now. Jenny, Anja,
Russell. They were standing huddled together at the end of the corridor, their eyes
shocked with fear and disbelief. Jenny was crying and Anja was staring open-mouthed at
Bird. Bird wasn’t moving. He lay on the floor with his knees pulled up to his
chest and his arms cradled over his head.

Russell shuffled over to him.

I crossed over to Fred.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said, panting. He
wiped sweat from his face and glanced inside the lift. The dead Dobermann was splayed
out on its side. Its ears were laid back and its mouth was hanging open, revealing two
rows of blood-flecked yellow teeth.

‘Shit,’ I said.

Fred laid his hand on my shoulder.
‘Never a dull moment, eh?’

Bird’s not dead. He’s hurt
quite badly, but he’s not dead. He’s got a nasty gaping wound in his neck
and he’s lost a lot of blood. Russell cleaned the wound with water, then left it
to bleed. Anja was all for bandaging it but Russell said it’s best to let it
bleed. It helps to clean the wound, apparently.

‘Will he be all right?’ I asked
him.

Russell shrugged. ‘It’s a nasty
bite and it’s near the head. But as long as it doesn’t get infected, he
should be OK.’

‘What happens if it does get
infected?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Is there anything we can
do?’

‘He needs antibiotics.’

‘No chance. Anything else?’

Russell laughed humourlessly. ‘We
could always try praying.’

So that was Monday. Or Tuesday, or
Wednesday …

That was today.

Now it’s nearly midnight and
everything is quiet. I’m hungry. I’m cold. I’m all mixed up. Was it my
fault He sent down the dog? Am I to blame for Bird getting hurt? Or would it have
happened anyway? I don’t know. I really don’t know. But whatever the answer
is, I’m not going to feel bad about myself. I can’t afford to. I
can’t
blame myself. I mean, you do what you do, don’t you? You
just do it. What else can you do?

What would
you
do?

If you were me, what would you do? Give up?
Would you just give up? Would you lie down and cry? Would you just lie down and take
what’s coming. Take what you’re given. Take it …

Maybe I should?

Maybe I should just give up. Give in. Here,
have my life. Go on, take it. Do what you want with it. I don’t care.

I don’t know.

Maybe I should try apologizing again, only
this time add a bit more grovel to it. I could get down on my knees, close my eyes, tell
Him how wonderful He is …

On second thoughts, I think I’d rather
just give up.

Midday.

No food.

We’re still putting a shopping list in
the lift every night, but when the lift comes down in the morning the list has gone and
there’s no food, no nothing. Just an empty lift. There’s still a few bits
and pieces of food left in the fridge, so we’re not starving yet. Just hungry and
cold. The heat’s still off and it’s absolutely freezing down here. The walls
are filmed with ice.

Bird’s not looking too good. His
neck’s gone red and he’s got a fever. He’s spent the last two days
lying in bed, moaning and groaning all the time. Mind you, that’s what he does
most of the time anyway, so I’m not too worried about it.

A disturbing moment. I came across Russell
in the corridor this morning. He was just standing there staring at the wall.

‘Mr Lansing?’ I said.
‘Russell?’

He turned and looked at me. ‘Hello
there.’

‘What are you doing?’

He smiled. ‘Interview.’

‘What?’

‘They want to see me about
something.’ He winked. ‘Disciplinary procedure.’

I didn’t know what to say.

I left him there looking at the wall.

Jenny’s got a bad cold. At least, I
hope it’s just a cold. Her eyes are all runny and she keeps coughing all the
time.

Apart from all that though, everything is
just fine.

Late evening.

Quiet. White. Cold. Dead.

I put a note in the lift tonight asking for
antibiotics and something for Jenny’s cold. I know it’s a waste of time, but
I can afford it. I’ve got all the time in the world. I mean, we might not have any
food or heat in here, but the one thing He can’t take away from us is time. He can
mess around with our perception of it – or at least He could before I smashed up the
clock – but He can’t
deny
us time. We’ve got plenty of that.

Plenty of time.

I’ve been thinking about it.

Time …

Tick tock.

First thing. I’ve just realized what
day it is, 29th February. I think it’s the 29th anyway. I think this year is a
leap year. I can never remember how you’re supposed to work it out.

Not that it matters.

But if I’m right, I’ve been here
a month. Actually, it’s 32 days. I’ve just worked it out. 32 days. 768
hours. 46,080 minutes. 2,764,800 seconds. Give or take a day or two. Or three.

It’s all relative, of course.

Say I’ve been here a month. I’m
sixteen years and four months old (give or take a few days), which is 196 months. So a
month to me is 1/196th of my life. But Russell … well, let’s say
he’s seventy. Seventy years is 840 months. So he’s been here for 1/840th of
his life. And Jenny, in her terms, has been here longer than both of us. I don’t
know exactly how old she is (I know she’s nine, but I don’t when she’s
ten), but if we say for the sake of simplicity that she’s ten, that means
she’s been here for almost 1/120th of her life.

See? A month means different things to
different people. That’s what I mean by time being relative.

Time …

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it.
I’ve thought about it so much, I’ve thought myself into a dead end.

And another thing …

It’s hard.

Hold on.

Let me get this straight.

Right, it goes something like this.
You’ve got the past, the present, and the future, OK? Time-wise, that’s all
you’ve got. Then, now, and when. The past has gone. You can’t exist in the
past, can you? It’s gone. You can remember it, but you can’t exist in it.
And you can’t exist in the future either, can you? It hasn’t happened yet.
So that leaves the present. Now. But if you think about it, if you ask yourself what the
present actually is,
when
it is … I mean, how long is the present?
How long is
now
? This moment, right now, the moment you exist in. How long does
it last? A second? Half a second? A quarter of a second? An eighth of a second? You can
go on halving it for ever, again and again and again. You can take it down to an
infinitesimally small period of time, a squillionth of a nanosecond,
and then you can
still
halve it again. How can you exist in such an
immeasurably small period of time? You can’t, can you? It’s too small to
experience. It’s gone before you know it.

But if you can’t exist now, and you
can’t exist in the future or the past – when the hell
do
you exist?

Time …

I went to see Russell about it. That’s
the kind of thing he knows about, time and stuff. But he was in a daze again. He thought
I was someone called Fabian.

I don’t suppose it matters.

We’re completely out of food now.
This morning we shared out the last of the crackers. Two each. Yum yum. There’s
nothing like a stale cracker to raise the spirits.

Bird’s up and about. His neck and half
his face have turned a weird shade of blue, and he’s got these horrible purply-red
blotches all over his skin. He’s walking about though, so he can’t be that
bad. I asked him how he was feeling, but he wouldn’t even look at me.

He tried to get an extra cracker. He said he
was sick, he needed the extra energy. He wanted one of mine. Said it was my fault he was
sick, so I should give him one of my crackers.

Fred told him to shut up.

It’s funny. Bird hates Fred. I
don’t think he hates him as much as he hates me, but it’s pretty close. He
thinks Fred’s an idiot. Coarse. Brutal. Scummy. He thinks he’s a lowlife.
But now he owes him his life, and he’s not sure how to deal with it. He
doesn’t know how to show gratitude. If it was me, I’d just say thanks,
thanks a lot for saving my life, and leave it at that. But Bird seems to think he owes
Fred something more, like he’s beholden to him or something. So he acts all
subordinate, all cringey, but at the same time he can’t hide his contempt for him.
It creeps into his smile like a really bad smell.

It’s pathetic really.

I had a long chat with Russell this evening.
I didn’t mention the incident when he went a bit funny, but I think he knows about
it. He looked a bit embarrassed, like a drunk who knows he’s done something stupid
but can’t remember what it was. Anyway, Russell told me all this stuff about when
he was a kid, about his parents and school and what is was like growing up black and
gay. He made it sound funny, but I think he had a pretty tough time. He got beaten up
quite a lot.

When the kids at boarding school first
started picking on me, I thought it had something to do with Dad being rich, that the
other kids were just jealous, but I soon realized they had nothing to be jealous about.
Their parents were all rolling in money too,
huge
amounts of money, and at
least half of them had
real
celebrities for parents. Real A-list celebrities.
Lords and ladies, minor royals, MPs, rock stars, film stars, that kind of thing.
Compared to their parents, my dad was nothing. And then I started thinking that maybe
that was why they picked on me. Because I was common, working class. I had no breeding.
Or maybe they didn’t like my long hair? The way I speak?

Or maybe they just didn’t like me?

That’s possible, isn’t it? Maybe
I’m not very nice? I mean, you can’t tell, can you? You can’t tell if
you’re nice or not. You think you are, but everyone thinks they’re nice.
Everyone thinks they’re all right.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. They
picked on me, it doesn’t matter why. They just did.

Russell asked me what I’m going to do
when I get out of here, if I’m going back home to Dad.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Probably. The street’s all right for a
while, but in the
end it’s no better than anywhere else. Same crappy people, same crappy life. Same
old shit. At least Dad doesn’t steal my stuff.’

‘Do you miss him?’ Russell
said.

‘I don’t know him enough to miss
him.’

Russell looked at me.

I sighed. ‘Yeah, I miss
him.’

Dad tried to find me when I first ran away.
He had all these posters printed up, you know, the usual MISSING PERSON kind of thing,
with my name and photograph and everything. He had them stuck up all over the place. I
saw quite a few around London, in railway and underground stations mostly, but Dad
didn’t actually know where I was, so he had the posters put up all over the
country. I found out about it from this girl I met who’d come down from
Northampton. Sophie. I met her one day hanging around outside McDonald’s at
Liverpool Street. She was dressed in a threadbare skirt, thin black tights, and
bright-red monkey boots. She was kind of nice. Anyway, we got talking and she said she
recognized me from posters she’d seen in Northampton.

After that I cut my hair short and dyed it
blond.

Dad hired a private detective too. A dirty
little man in a cheap suit. He started sniffing around, asking questions, showing people
my photograph, but he didn’t last long. Pretty Bob tracked him down and beat him
up. I don’t think he did it for my sake, he just likes beating people up.