84k

  “I don’t ask anything,” Neila mused as they sat together by candlelight. “Loneliness is a state of mind. You have to want something, to be lonely. You have to need some sort of reassurance, someone to tell you that this is who you are. I’m not lonely. I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything or anyone to tell me that … you know that, don’t you? You know that’s how I …”

  They held hands, watched the fire melt.

  Theo said, staring into flames, “There’s a place where the words stop. She did this and it was … and then we stop. It was terrible. It was barbaric. It was beautiful. You understand. And we do. We know. Our lives exist in many different, contradictory states, all at once. I am a liar. I am a killer. I am honest. I am fighting for a good cause. I am burning the world. We want things simple, and safe, and when they aren’t, when the truth is something complicated, something hard, or scary, we stop. The words run out. Everything becomes …”

  Sound died on his lips. A dead place where he once thought he had the answers and where now he isn’t so sure.

  “It’s how it happens, of course. The worst of it. Not ‘My neighbour has been taken to be burned alive, their house stolen, their children dead and I am so, so scared to speak of it.’ Just ‘They went away. Just—away.’ And we smile. And everyone else is as scared as we are, and knows what that smile means. Is grateful that you didn’t make the terror real. Thankful that you haven’t caused a stink. Because it would hurt … someone. Someone who isn’t a stranger would get hurt, if we ever managed to speak the truth of things. If we ever had the courage to say what we really think, even if it destroyed who we want the world to think we are. Who it is we think we should be. There would be too much pain. So we say nothing. Things just … trail away into a smile, which everyone understands and doesn’t have to mean a thing. We are grateful for that silence, for the thing that can’t be expressed. To fill it would be a terrible thing.”

  She put her head on his shoulder, and they sat together a while longer, waiting for the morning.

  At 8.45 a.m. Theo perched on a stool on the prow of the Hector, a hot mug of tea in his hand, watching the sky.

  At ten minutes past nine the man called Markse appeared, walking around the bend of the towpath, hands free at his sides, coat open, head up and eyes bright.

  He didn’t slow when he saw Theo.

  Stopped in front of the boat.

  Smiled.

  Said, “There you are. Shall we?”

  Theo nodded once, stood, folded the stool neatly against the wall of the cabin and followed Markse into the morning.

  Two and a half hours later he returned, hands buried in his bulging pockets, chin tucked into his chest, and said, “Sorry about that. I have some pastries, if you’d like one?”

  She had a cherry Danish. He had an almond croissant with margarine. Afterwards, they refilled the water tank and sailed north, towards Nottingham and the Trent.

  Chapter 42

  The man called Theo bought a ticket to Dover.

  He paid in cash, a baseball cap covering his eyes, head turned away from the CCTV camera above the desk.

  The ticket seller exclaimed, “If you use a card and register with our reward traveller scheme you can save up to 15 per cent on every trip you make with a value in excess of—”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do you want to receive our special offers for—”

  “No.”

  “How about buy one get one free on our latest range of—”

  “No.”

  Her face fell, and sulkily she pulled the handle that spun the small metal plate that gave him the tickets.

  He took the slow train.

  It ran once every two hours, and was standing room only for non-gold-club-membership passengers. Sitting on bags was not allowed; it constituted a health and safety violation. Music played faintly, a soul-numbing assault on reggae. He stood head down, eyes up, avoiding the security cameras in the creaking, stinking carriage as it rattled south. Metal grates on the windows offered limited protection against the ragers, the children and the wild women who haunted the edges of the tracks as they chugged out of Blackheath. Condensation from the breath of the passengers, elbow to elbow, dripped waterfalls off the inside of the glass. Outside Sevenoaks three children stood on the tracks, staring, staring at the driver, daring him to mow them down.

  The youngest child held a bicycle wheel in her right hand; the eldest carried a baby. The driver accelerated towards them, as he’d been trained to do, and they did not move, and did not move, and did not move, until at the last minute, in a breach of all guidelines, the driver slammed on the brakes, knocking people in the carriages to the floor, indignant screams and shrieks; one woman twisted her ankle, another man dislocated his shoulder as he grabbed, and missed, a handrail.

  The driver put the brakes on too late, but that didn’t matter to the children—they’d done enough, they’d won their victory, and they scampered away delighted as the train picked up speed again and waved at the passengers inside the secure carriages as it rattled by. A couple waved back.

  At Sevenoaks men in white shirts got off, and transport police got on, started checking IDs. Theo moved through the carriages slowly, a man looking for the toilet, and that bought him time to Tonbridge, where he got off the train and circled behind the police, pressing in between two teenagers with a pair of sticker-stamped guitar cases.

  At Bethersden a woman stood on the platform, holding out her hands to the open doors of the train. “Jesus!” she shouted, and then threw her head back and roared, “Jesus! Jesus Jesus Jesus!” And then lowered her head and murmured, “Jesus. Jesus the Jesus the Jesus the Saviour Jesus the Jesus the Almighty Jesus the—”

  The doors closed, cutting her off, but the lack of audience didn’t seem to deter her.

  There was a replacement bus from Ashford.

  Theo used elbows and brute forward momentum to get on, pushing children and old men aside. People scowled, cursed him under their breath, but did nothing more since they were doing the same anyway.

  Familiar countryside outside the windows.

  Tough grass clinging to the chalk slopes of the Downs; patches of forest, beech and oak, ash and sycamore, the red and brown leaves billowing away in the salty wind off the sea. Oast houses on the edges of little black and white flint-walled villages; commercial estates pressing hard against reedy rivers which had broken their shallow banks. A chalk figure carved into the hillside above the motorway, a rider galloping away, hair billowing in the wind. Recent years hadn’t been kind to the hills of Kent. The only work came from the companies which were owned by a company which was owned by …

  … and with no one else offering much in the way of employment, the companies had made certain demands on the local civic and political leaders—not demands exactly—requests—suggestions, that was it, suggestions. And when the workers had rioted the police were called in and by then the police were owned by the Company too. When it’s your job, it’s your job yeah, when it’s your wife and kids and look, cops have rent to pay too …

  Of course heads had been cracked.

  Of course they had.

  And the hospitals, run by the Company, hadn’t been willing to treat the men and women who’d rioted since they were only going to cause trouble, not within the charter to treat violent people. There’s funding to think about.

  Now there were just the ragers and the zeroes left. The screamers, the ones who tore at flesh, the ones left behind when the sirens stopped. Sometimes they scraped a living, picking fruit in summer or stacking shelves in the towns that had been smart enough to obey when the Company spoke, but at night they returned to the empty places whence they came and howled at the moon, and good people learned to look the other way.

  High fences cut the motorway off from the surrounding hills, as the bus idled in traffic jams for petrol stations, tailbacks on the Dover Road. Coastal–commercial partnership towns, two-storey terraced houses with paint scrape
d away by the sea, concrete front gardens and British flags flying proud, chippies on every other corner, the freshest fish you’d ever eat, seagulls circling the rubbish bins, orange-brick company offices and a shuttered-up library. A castle on the hill, layers of different worries built into its architecture. Once a keep whose soldiers rode inland to govern unruly natives. Then a wall circling the keep, with towers looking towards the sea. Then earthworks built for cannon, waiting for an invasion that didn’t come; then bunkers cut into the cliffs against bombardment, then nuclear shelters built all the way down, cold and dark, silent except for the endless drip-drip-dripping of water through the chalk, some people fainted going inside, knowing that if the torch went out, they would never be found.

  A port.

  Cranes, huge concrete car parks with painted lines to guide the way.

  Ferries inching in slow past the sea wall, the smell of diesel on the air, queues back to the overspill car park in town, next to the old Roman ruins where once there had stood a temple where men sacrificed in blood to an ancient spirit, half Zeus, half a pagan being that no one dared offend, even if they didn’t believe.

  At Dover there were no buses running to Shawford.

  He went to the taxi rank, but the drivers refused to take him there.

  “Budgetfood pulled out. No one goes there any more,” explained one. “No good, no good at all.”

  He thought of hiring a car, but they wanted his name, ID, credit card.

  He tried hiring a bicycle, but they wanted the same.

  In the end he walked.

  It wasn’t so far, really.

  Nine or ten miles, a little less if you cut inland, but he knew the cliff road best, the cliff road was just for pedestrians, less likely to arouse questions if you kept close to the sea.

  Theo walked.

  Chapter 43

  Beneath the White Cliffs of Dover, where the chalk bends towards Hellfire Corner, and the smell of the docks gives way to the billow of the sea, there is a moment when the land breaks free of the town, steps into fields of wheat rippling in the wind, the ocean stretching like a prisoner set free, the sky infinite.

  Theo walked.

  A sanctuary village, above the bay.

  They’d built a fence around it with a locked gate, sealing in the houses that rolled down towards the water, the crab pools, the waterfall sheering to the shingle beach, the pub with its bright flags and overpriced kale salads with extra-virgin olive oil.

  “Stop! Stop right there! You!”

  Theo stopped, half-tangled in brambles, circling the path that surrounded the razor wire. A man and a woman, dressed in black, came running towards him, panting for breath up the slow slope of the path.

  “You!” the man managed to gasp, wheezing, and when that word seemed to take his stamina, the woman picked up where he’d left off.

  “You! What are you doing here?”

  “I’m walking to Shawford.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s where I’m from.”

  “But what are you doing here?”

  “I’m walking to Shawford. Is there a problem?”

  “This area and the bay is protected land. You can’t come here.”

  “It’s protected land inside the fence. I’m outside.”

  “But you’re near the fence!”

  “But not inside it.”

  “You’re looking inside!”

  “I’m not walking inside.”

  “People have seen you and complained!”

  “I don’t think I can do anything about that.”

  The two guards hesitated. Technically this was true; Theo could not stop people looking, if looking was what they chose to do. Then the woman exclaimed, struck by a bright idea, “We’ll walk with you!”

  “To Shawford?”

  “Round the edge of the village.”

  “If you want.”

  “That way people will see!”

  “I suppose if they …”

  “And they’ll feel safe.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “Do you want an apple?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve got some apples. Oh—and some fudge. Do you want fudge?”

  “As you’re offering …”

  “Take them, please. I can’t move for apples and fudge. It’s the locals. You as much as look at someone funny and they give you apples and fudge.”

  “And tea,” added the man, falling into step on the other side of Theo, as they continued to track the line of the fence. “I’ve had to start carrying my own teabags, decaffeinated. What I do is—they make the tea, and when they’re not looking I whisk their teabag away and put mine in so that I don’t die young. Do you want a teabag? Caffeinated, I mean, not decaf.”

  They walked together beneath grey autumn sky, a military escort around a village where the school always had a summer fête and a harvest festival, and the delivery man only ever served organic.

  “Once we had some ragers come up from Shawford,” mused the woman as they swung past a white lighthouse, the light long since snuffed, barbed wire on top of the wall, HOME SWEET HOME painted above the door. “I thought we were going to die.”

  “Die!” agreed the man.

  “I thought, this is it, they’ve come to tear this place apart and I’m not paid enough, pardon me saying, I’m not paid enough to be fucking massacred for a bunch of rich wankers who don’t—”

  “Don’t say wankers!”

  “Affluent clients who don’t ever look out, don’t leave the walls because if you leave the walls …”

  “Never leave the walls!”

  “There are people if you leave the walls you see …”

  “But thankfully the Company came, they sent a helicopter with tear gas and a machine gun …”

  “I wouldn’t call it a machine gun.”

  “A machine gun it was—”

  “There were rubber bullets.”

  “I saw the bodies, those bullets weren’t—”

  “It’s what our clients pay for, you see.”

  “They pay to be safe!”

  “Protected.”

  “So that’s why.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want some fudge?”

  In the end Theo accepted two apples, four teabags and some fudge. It seemed rude to say no.

  Five miles further on …

  The wind off the sea blows away all doubts, it blows away the past and the smallness of this world, it tears open the sky the fields ripple like water; it blows away the tiny cramped-up prison bars that you built across your soul the wind is …

  Theo isn’t sure he has the words for what it is. It is a thing he cannot express. If he could express it, he might have to say what else the wind purges from his soul, and he can’t imagine saying these things out loud would make anyone happy.

  Walking past an abandoned golf course.

  A monument to pilots who died in a war, buddleia growing from between the cracks.

  A trapdoor down to an unknown place beneath the cliffs, a single KEEP OUT sign nailed to the posts, rusted and ancient.

  A village close enough to the water’s edge that sometimes the sea came up through their toilets, through the basements where once the smugglers had hidden their goods, chimney stacks crumbling and semi-detached retirement homes slanting a little to the side as the land gave way.

  Great stems of pale brown and bright green grew from the peppered stones where they met the edge of the land, spiny, spindly, no flowers or leaves, just a forest of stems heading upwards. An empire of snails had taken up residence amongst these stalks, their shells spirals of blood red edged with black, imperial yellow dotted with white spots, flashes of blue. A single tree had managed to grow in that muddy area where stone met farmer’s field, and over the centuries its roots had spread beneath the land, sprouting in shrubs and spindly white-barked children. Someone had put a tyre swing inside the den it made of its own umbrella branches. Theo ducked beneath the canopy of l
eaves, a habit, a thing from his childhood, he had come here once and it had been …

  That was in the time before he was Theo Miller, and these things should not affect him any more.

  He walked through the village, and the curtains twitched, and grey eyes peered at him from behind the netting and through the cracks in the doors, and no one moved, and no one spoke, and no one walked along the edge of the water.

  He saw the pier at Shawford before he saw the rest of the town, sticking out into the sea before the curve of the bay.

  Several spans had cracked, fallen into the water. Now Dory’s Café lurked at the end, cut off from the world, lights out, and the fishing deck was swamped for most of the year, unusable as the waves crawled in.

  A small rose-shaped stone fort marked the edge of town, built by Henry VIII a few months after he realised he’d pissed off the pope. Black iron cannon, the ends plugged with red bungs, pointed out towards the sea. No flags flew, and the gates were barred.

  On the hill above the houses the Budgetfood Estate was silent, vines breaking through the loose corrugated-iron walls. No lorries came, no lorries left, and grass pushed up through the cracks in the pavement.

  He walked into town, past the seafront apartments where the old folks had sat in long bay windows to watch the yacht club and the passing trawlers, along the shopping street of boarded windows and street lamps with no bulbs in them. Baskets still hung from some of the lamps, the soil long since washed away, the exposed roots rotted to wisps. On the walls of the local Indian takeaway someone had graffitied, WILL YOU MARRY ME? but if an answer had been given, it hadn’t endured.

  The paddling pool was empty. There were poked holes where the crazy golf had been, a scar in the tarmac where the ice cream van had stood. Somewhere deep in town he heard the sound of raging, a man’s voice soon joined by a woman’s, soon joined by a few others, a call and response of unseen faces rising in fury.

  Theo shuddered and was briefly afraid, and scurried on.

  A man sat on a bench opposite the place where Budgetfood had once run “Microwave Meal Fridays,” discount days when it offloaded its inferior goods cheap for the town. The man had thin ginger hair, a round, smiling face stained red by the wind, a great belly and tiny legs. He smiled affably at Theo as Theo walked by, and didn’t move.