The Bunker Diary (20 page)

See?

Same crappy people …

I’ve had enough of this.

Haven’t managed to write for a while.
Can’t think of anything to say. I’m hungry, it’s cold, I’m
bored, scared, fed up.

The same old stuff.

God, I’m
so
fed up.

It gets to the point when you can’t do
anything. You can’t think any more. You can’t remember anything. You
don’t feel anything. You can’t even get angry any more. You just lie on your
bed all day staring into space. Then the lights go out and you stare at the
darkness.

The lights come on.

The empty lift comes down.

The day passes.

The empty lift goes up.

The lights go off.

I try to keep thinking, but the more I
concentrate, the more confusing it gets. What am I doing? Thinking. Thinking?
What’s that?
Thinking?
How does
that
work?

I think about that and my head starts
spinning.

It gets worse.

I imagine myself as being nothing more than
sixteen years of bone, skin, muscle, brain, blood, meat, and jelly. I imagine symbols
inside my head. Electric things. Circuits. Tubes. Spatial
patterns
frozen in time. Tiny things. Bits of stuff. Short jaggedy strings. Carbon.
Components.

Stuff.

I think about it.

I think about what that stuff can do.

It can move me. It can walk. It can breathe.
It grows. It can see. It can hear, feel, smell, taste. It can like and hate. It can
want. It needs. It can fear. It can speak. It can laugh. It can sleep. It can play. It
can wonder. It can tell lies. It can remember. It can live with doubts and
uncertainties. It can sing, la la. It can dance. It can dream. It bleeds. It coughs. It
blinks. It shivers and sweats. It can live without love.

It’s complicated.

It can:

Analyse.

Coordinate.

Destroy.

Dream.

Secrete.

Control.

Generate.

Degenerate.

Synthesize.

Emote.

Regulate.

Calculate.

Imagine.

It can run.

Play.

Jump.

Judge.

It can catch a ball.

And dance.

And fight.

And cry.

It can know at night that the morning will
come.

It can spit.

Recognize.

Ride a bike.

It can kill.

Whistle.

Ask.

And forget.

It can hope.

And hurt.

It can come to know that there’s
nothing to know.

And it can, and it will, close my eyes.

I’m feeling better now. We’ve
still got no food, and it’s still very cold, but I seem to have found some energy
from somewhere, and I’ve managed to shake off the worst of the gloom.

I don’t feel quite so desperate any
more.

I’m not sure what happened to me over
the last few days. I lost myself, I think. I sank down into a hole for a while.

They’re tricky things, holes. You
don’t know you’re in one until you get out.

This morning I killed and ate a couple of
cockroaches. Big ones. They were in the kitchen, behind the burned-out cooker. I was
just poking around down there, having a look. You never know what you’re going to
find down the back of a cooker, do you? The cockroaches were on the wall. I grabbed them
fast, squished them up, stuck the goo in a cup, mixed in a bit of cooking oil, and
swallowed the lot.

It tasted foul.

Later. 11.57 p.m. to be precise.

We’ve got a new clock.

A few hours ago the knock-out gas came on. I
was in my room, sitting on the bed trying to get some knots out of my hair. I heard the
hissing, looked up, and then I smelled the
chemicals. I got up and
started wrapping a sheet round my head, but it was too late. My eyes started streaming,
the stuff got into my lungs, and that was that.

When I woke up I went out and checked on the
others. They were all up and about, apart from Bird, who was lying on his bed gasping
like a stranded fish. I haven’t seen him for a while and I didn’t realize
how bad he’s got. He looks terrible. His skin’s all streaked and
discoloured, his head’s swollen, his neck’s as stiff as a board, and his
eyes are bulging like mad. It was a really shocking sight. Too much to cope with.

I left his room and went to join the
others.

We had a good look round to see if
He’d come down and done anything while we were all knocked out, but the only thing
we could find was the clock. A brand-new clock.

Exactly the same as the old clock.

Just for a moment I had an irresistible urge
to smash it.

That was about it.

We all hung around for a bit, trying to
think of something to say, but no one could think of anything. New clock? Big deal. You
can’t eat it, can you? After a while the silence got too much and everyone started
drifting back to their rooms.

I followed Russell and caught up with him at
his door.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ I
said.

He looked at me with distant eyes.

‘About Bird,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Bird. I think he’s really
ill.’

Russell just nodded.

I said, ‘Have you seen him
recently?’

‘Who?’

‘
Bird
.’

Russell blinked. ‘I’m sorry,
I’m very tired. Can we talk about this some other time?’

‘But I think he’s –’

‘There’s nothing you can do
about it. He’s dying. We’re all dying. You might as well get used to
it.’

Then he turned and shut the door on me.

It’s five minutes before lights-out.
I wonder if they’re going to be five long minutes or five short minutes. I wonder
how He adjusts the time. Does He do it manually? Is it automated? Computerized? Has He
got the clock linked up to some kind of time-adjusting mechanism, something He
downloaded from the Internet or bought at one of those gadget places in Tottenham Court
Road?

And another thing I wonder.

I wonder if He read my notebook when He came
down here.

Did you?

Hey, Mister, did you read this when you came
down here? Did you take a peek at my innermost thoughts? Did you? No, I don’t
think you did. In fact, I
know
you didn’t. You see, I’m pretty
sneaky. I can tell if this notebook’s been moved. I can tell if it’s even
been
touched
. You want to know how? Well, tough, I’m not telling you.

Mind you, I don’t need to be
that
sneaky when it comes to you. I would have known anyway. If you’d
touched this notebook I would have smelled it a mile away. The pages would have reeked
of shit.

A word about Jenny.

We spend a lot of time together. Even in the
bad times – when I’m feeling down, or she’s feeling sick, or the other way
round – we spend hours together every day. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t.
It doesn’t matter. Just being together is enough. I tell her stories, make up
jokes. We play word games. Russell joins in sometimes, when he’s not too tired.
Fred occasionally. But mostly it’s just me and Jenny. If I’m not in the mood
for stories or jokes she just babbles on about her friends, or her family, or what she
thinks about things – pop groups, TV, dogs, clothes. I don’t have to do anything.
I just listen. Nod my head. Say uh-huh now and then. Or not. It doesn’t
matter.

It’s good.

It keeps us both going.

Me more than her, probably.

She’s coping pretty well. She
looks
a mess – skinny, dirty, tired – but then we all look a mess. The
difference with Jenny is her eyes. Even when they’re runny, her eyes are clear.
Alive. As bright as the day she arrived. The rest of us have dead eyes.

Earlier this evening she told me that Anja
has some food.

‘
What?
’ I said.

‘Cornflakes. I saw them in her
room.’

‘What were you doing in her
room?’

Jenny looked a little embarrassed. ‘I
wanted to ask her about something.’

‘What?’

She blushed. ‘Nothing … just
a girl thing.’

‘Oh, right.’

She smiled awkwardly. ‘I knocked on
her door and went in. I didn’t
mean
to be rude. I thought I’d heard
her say, “Come in.” But I don’t think she did because when I went in
she was putting a packet of cornflakes under her bed. I saw her, Linus. She shouted at
me. Told me to get out.’

‘Cornflakes?’

She nodded. ‘I saw them.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I
saw
them.’

I suppose she must have had them stored away
since before the food ran out. So while the rest of us have been starving to death
she’s been munching away on cornflakes.

‘Stay here,’ I told Jenny.

I went out into the corridor, stomped across
to Anja’s room and barged in without knocking. She was sitting on the floor with
her back against the wall, dressed only in her underwear. White lace, all grubby and
stained.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What the
fuck –?’

‘Shut up.’

I went over to her bed and looked underneath
it. There was nothing there. I went over to the bedside cabinet and opened the door.
Meanwhile Anja had got to her feet and was screaming at me.

‘What the hell do you think
you’re
doing
? Get away from that. How
dare
you come in here
without … 
hey
!’

Inside the cabinet, as well as the cornflakes,
there was a thick crust of mouldy bread, half a bar of chocolate, and a slab of dried-up
cheese.

‘Now, hold on a minute,’ Anja
spluttered. ‘Listen, I can explain …’

I swept the food into my arms, kicked the
cabinet shut, and walked out.

Anja called after me, ‘I hope you puke
on it, you self-righteous little
bastard.
’

I gave most of the food to Jenny. The rest
of it I divided up and shared out between the four of us. Russell was asleep, so I left
his share on the bedside cabinet. Bird didn’t want his, but I left it for him
anyway. Fred just looked at the handful of manky old food and asked me where I’d
got it from. I told him I’d found it down the back of the cooker. He didn’t
believe me, but he was too hungry to bother with the truth. He took the food and wolfed
it all down in one go.