The Memoirs of a Survivor

  Hugo moved forward into the space before the mirror and sniffed and smelled at it, and then at the floor where Emily had stood. The mother’s face was twisted with dislike, but now it was this beast that was affecting her so. ‘Go away,’ she said, in a low, breathless voice - that voice squeezed out of us by an extremity of dislike or fear. ‘Go away, you dirty filthy animal.’ And Hugo retreated to me, we backed away together before the advancing woman who had her fist raised to hit me, hit Hugo. We backed away, fast, then faster, while the woman advanced, grew large, became enormous, absorbing into herself Emily’s girlhood room with its simpering conventionality, the incongruous mirror and - snap! - we were back in the living-room, in the dark place where the single candle bloomed in its hollow of light, where the small fire warmed a little space of air around it. I was sitting in my usual place. Hugo was upright near the wall, looking at me. We looked at each other. He was whimpering … no, the right word is crying. He was crying, in desolation, as a human does. He turned and crept away into my bedroom.

  And that was the last time I saw Emily there in what I have called the ‘personal’. I mean that I did not again enter scenes that showed her development as a girl, or baby, or child. That horrible mirror-scene, with its implications of perversity, was the end. Nor, entering that other world through - and this was new, too - the flames, or the husbanded glow of the fire as I sat beside it through these long autumn nights, did I find the rooms which opened and opened out from each other: or I did not think I had. Returning from a trip into that place, I could not keep a clear memory of what I had experienced, where I had been. I would know that I had been there, from the emotions that sustained, or were draining, me: I had been fed there, from some capacious, murmuring source all comfort and sweetness; I had been frightened and threatened. Or perhaps in, or under, the thick light of this room seemed now to shimmer another light which came from there -I had brought it with me and it stayed for a while, making me long for what it represented.

  And when it faded, how slow and dim and heavy was the air … Hugo had developed a dry cough and, as we sat together, he might suddenly jump up and go to the window, nosing at it, his sides labouring, and I would open it, realizing that I, too, was in a stupor from the fug and the heaviness of the room. We would stand there side by side, breathing the air that flowed in from outside, trying to flush our lungs clean with it.

  • • • • •

  After some days when I had not seen Emily at all, I went to Gerald’s house through streets which were disordered, as always, but seemed much cleaner. It was as if an excess of dirtiness and mess had erupted everywhere, but then winds, or at least movements of air, had taken some of it away. I saw no one during this walk.

  I half expected to find that efforts had been made towards restoring the vegetable garden. No. It was wrecked and trampled, and some chickens were at work in it. A dog was creeping towards them under the bushes. This was so rare a sight that I had to stop and look. Not one dog, but a pack of dogs, and they were creeping on all sides towards the pecking chickens. I cannot tell you how uneasy this made me: there was something enormous waiting to burst in on me, some real movement and change in our situation: dogs! a pack of dogs, eleven or twelve of them, what could it possibly mean? And, watching them, my prickling skin and the cold sweat on my forehead told me I was afraid, and had good reason to be: the dogs could choose me instead of the chickens. I went as fast as I could inside the house. Which was clean and empty. Ascending through the house I was listening for life in the rooms off the landings -nothing. At the top of the house, a closed door. I knocked and Emily opened it a crack - saw it was me, and let me in, shutting it fast again and bolting it. She was dressed in furs, trousers of rabbit or cat, a fur jacket, a grey fur cap pulled low over her face. She looked like a pantomime cat. But pale, and sorrowful. Where was Gerald?

  She returned to a nest she had made for herself on the floor, of fur rugs and fur cushions. The room smelled like a den from the furs, but sniffing, trying it out, I realized that otherwise the air was fresh and sharp, and that I was breathing it in great gasps. Emily made a place for me in the rugs, and I sat and covered myself. It was very cold: no heating here. We sat quietly together - breathing.

  She said: ‘Now that the air outside has become impossible to breathe, I spend as much time as I can here.’

  And I understood it was true: this was a moment when someone said something which crystallized into fact intimations only partly grasped that had been pointing towards an obvious conclusion … in this case, it was that the air we breathed had indeed become hard on our lungs, had been getting fouler and thicker for a long time. We had become used to it, were adapting: I, like everyone else, had been taking short, reluctant breaths, as if rationing what we took into our lungs, our systems, could also ration the poisons - what poisons? But who could know, or say!This was ‘it’, again, in a new form - ‘it’, perhaps, in its original form?

  Sitting in that room, whose floor was all covered with furs for lying and reclining, a room in which there was nothing to do but to lie, or to sit, I realized that I was -happy simply to be there, and breathe. Which I did, for a long time, while my head cleared and my spirits lightened. I looked out through clean polythene at a thick sky turbulent with clouds that held snow; I watched the light changing on the wall. From time to time Emily and I smiled at each other. It was very quiet everywhere. There came at one point a violent cackling and snarling from the garden, but we did not move. It ceased. Silence again. We sat on, without moving, just breathing.

  There were machines in the room: one hanging from the ceiling, another on the floor, one nailed to a wall. These were for purifying the air, and they worked by sending out streams of electrons, negative ions - people had used them for some time; just as no one would dream of using water from the taps unless it had passed through one of the many types of water purifier. Air and water, water and air, the basics of our substance, the elements we swim in, move in, of which we are formed and reformed, continuously, perpetually recreated and renewed … for how long had we had to distrust them, evade them, treat them as possible enemies?

  ‘You should take some machines home with you,’ she said. There’s a room full of them.’

  ‘Gerald?’

  ‘Yes, he went to a warehouse. There’s a room of them under this one. But I’ll help you carry them. How can you live in that filthy air?’ And she said this in the way one does bring something out one has wanted to say, but has kept back.

  She was smiling - and reproachful.

  ‘Are you coming back …” -I hesitated to say ‘home’, but she said: ‘Yes, I’ll come home with you.’

  ‘Hugo will be pleased,’ I said, not meaning any reproach, but her eyes filled and she reddened.

  ‘Why are you able to come now?” I asked, risking it; but she simply shook her head, meaning: I’ll answer in a moment … And she did, when she had taken herself into control.

  There’s no point in my staying here now.’

  ‘Gerald has gone?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is. Not since he brought the machines.’

  ‘He is making a new gang for himself?’

  Trying to.’

  When she was on her feet, rolling up furs into big bundles to take with us, laying out others in which to wrap machines, there was a knock, and Emily went to see who it was. No, not Gerald, but a couple of children. At the sight of children, I was afraid. And I realized ‘in a flash’ -another one! - that I, that everybody, had come to see all

  children as, simply, terrifying. Even before the arrival of the ‘poor little kids’ this had been true.

  These two, dirty, bright-faced, sharp, wary, sat on the fur-floor, apart from us, and apart from each other. Each held a heavy stick, with a nail-studded knob, ready for use against us, and against each other.

  ‘Thought I’d get a breath of fresh air,’ said one, a redheaded boy, all milky skin and charming freckles. The other, a fair, angelic little girl,
said, for herself: ‘Yes, I wanted some fresh air.’

  They sat and breathed and watched while we, keeping an eye on them, went on with the rolling and packing.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Tell Gerald he knows where to find me.’

  This gave me too much food for thought for me to absorb at once.

  These children were part of Gerald’s new gang? Were they not members of the gang of children from the Underground? If this was true, then … perhaps that gang was only lethal as a unit, but the individuals were savable, and Gerald had been right? When our packs were ready, we left, the children coming with us; but they left us on seeing the butcher’s yard that was the garden: feathers everywhere, bits of flesh, a dead dog. The children were cutting up the dog as we left, squatting on either side of the carcass, at work with sharp bits of steel.

  We returned through streets which I pointed out to Emily as being, surely? less filthy - and noted her small checked reaction. Streets which had no one in them, not a soul apart from ourselves - I commented on this, too, and heard her sigh. She was being patient with me.

  In the lobby of the building we lived in, a great vase that had held flowers was lying in fragments outside the lift. There was a dead rat among the rubbish. As Emily took the animal by the tail to throw it out into the street, Professor White, Mrs White, and Janet came along the corridor we jointly used. They had so far retained old ways that it was possible to say at once they were dressed for traveling - coats, scarves, suitcases. Seeing them thus, all three together, was a reminder of that other world or stratum of society, above ours, where people still presented themselves through clothes or belongings, for occasions. The Whites, as if nothing had happened to our world, were off on a journey, and Janet was saying: ‘Oh quick, do let’s go, let’s go, Mummy, Daddy, it’s so horrid being here when there’s no one left.’ Click - there it was again, the few words flung out, emitted as if by the atmosphere itself, by ‘it’, summing up a new state of affairs that had not yet got itself summed up - or at least, not by me. I saw Emily’s shrewd little glance at me, and she even instinctively moved a step closer, in a maternal gesture of protection for what might be a moment of weakness. I stood silent, watching the Whites fuss and arrange, seeing my past, our pasts: it looked comic. It was comic. We always had been ridiculous, little, self-important animals, acting our roles, playing our parts … it was not pretty, watching the Whites, and seeing oneself. And then we all said goodbye, quite in the old style: it was nice to know you, I hope we’ll meet again, all that kind of thing, as if nothing much was happening. They had discovered that a coach was going out of the city that afternoon, ten miles to the north, on some kind of official business. Not for the use of ordinary citizens, but they had bribed and urged their way into being on this coach, which would set them down a mile from the airport, with their luggage. An official flight was scheduled for the extreme north this afternoon: again, while no ordinary person could ever get on such a flight, the head of a department and his family might just manage it, if they had the money - astronomical, of course, not for fares but, again, for bribes. What bartering and promises and threats and appeals must have gone into this journey, what a fearful effort - and all of it entirely in the new style, our new mode, that of survival, of surviving at all costs - but not a trace of this showed in their manner: Goodbye, goodbye, it was nice to have you both as neighbours, see you soon perhaps, yes I do hope so, goodbye, pleasant journey.

  We went into my flat, and from the windows watched them walk down the street carrying their heavy cases.

  The rooms next to mine would be empty now. Empty … it occurred to me that I had been seeing very few people around in the lobby, the corridors. What had happened to the market? I asked Emily and she shrugged, clearly feeling that I ought to know. I left my flat again, and went to the janitor’s room down the passage. ‘In case of emergency, apply to Flat 7, 5th floor.’ The way the notice hung there crooked, the silence from behind the door, told me that he and his family had gone off, had left: that notice might have been there for weeks. But I went to the lift, which did sometimes work, and pressed the bell. The machine shifted somewhere above, and I waited on, pressing and peering, but the lift did not come, so I used the stairs, up and up, floor after floor empty, with no liveliness of trading and bartering anywhere. The traders, the buyers, the goods, all were gone, and there was nobody in Flat 7 on the fifth floor, but at the top of the building, near the roof, I saw some youngsters feeding horses with pitchforks of hay, and I retreated, not wanting to be seen, since some of those at work there were young children. I crept down that passage, passing more rooms that held animals: a goat’s head peered around a door, a pair of kingly lambs stood at the end of a corridor, and there was a shoveling and scraping from somewhere close and the smell of pigs. I tried the roof itself: up here was a flourishing market garden, with vegetables and herbs of all kinds, a polythene greenhouse, rabbits in cages, and a family, mother, father and three children, hard at work. They gave me the look of that time: Who are you? Friend? Enemy? - and waited, their implements held ready to use as weapons. Down I went again to the floor beneath and a child froze into a dark corner - he had been following me. His teeth were bared in a vindictive but calculated grin. I mean that the animosity was calculated, measured, so as to scare me. I could imagine him with a looking-glass he had picked up in some corner, practising a variety of horrible expressions. I was indeed frightened: his hand (like Emily’s these days!) was held close to his chest, where the handle of a knife showed. I thought I knew his face, believed - he was red-haired and the right size - he was one of the urchins who had visited Emily that same day. But of course I made no appeal on such sentimental grounds as acquaintance, but glared hack, and moved my right hand threateningly to where my - non-existent - knife was. He held his ground, and I walked on past him down the passage, looking into rooms, feeling him creep behind me, but at a good distance. I saw Gerald. He was sitting on heaps of furs surrounded by children - they were the ‘Underground gang’ and they were living in ‘my’ building. This gave me a real shock, and I went downstairs, boldly passing the little boy, who was keeping up his business of scowling and threatening. Down, down, and into my flat, which after all I had seen seemed a strange little place of order, of old-fashioned amenities, of warmth. Emily had made up a fire, and was sitting next to it, opposite Hugo. They were looking at each other, not touching, looking long and quiet at each other. The girl entirely wrapped in furs, so it was hard to tell where her own glossy hair began and ended, and the poor beast, with his rough and yellow hide - Beauty and her Beast, in this guise, but Beauty was so close to her Beast now, wrapped in beast’s clothing, as sharp and wary as a beast, surviving as one. Yes, Beauty had been brought down, brought very low … I had a bad moment, watching the two there, thinking how very near we were to running and scurrying like rats along tunnels - but saw that the fire was solid and glowing, the air machines we had brought were all at work, and the curtains had been drawn, with old blankets pinned over them. The air here was good, and clean, and I could feel my real self coming alive in it, but first I again left the flat and went out on the pavement. Dusk was coming down. Only a few people were on the gathering-place. They loitered there with a lost, uncertain look: so many tribes had left, and these were the laggards. How dark everything was! Usually, as dusk came down, hundreds of candle flames seemed to float up and down and along the great buildings: people at their windows, looking down, and the rooms behind them shadowy in candlelight. But now, this evening, there were a few little glimmers high up in the darkness. From my windows nothing at all, yet my rooms were still alive: it was not possible now to tell from lights at windows who was in the building. No lights in the streets, only a thick, heavy dark, the glow of a cigarette on the pavement, otherwise nothing. I found that I was standing there visualizing the dark face of the building and a single candle flame - mine -alive in it. So things had been recently. Anyone passing would ha
ve known that here, alone, undefended, was a single person, or a single family. I had been crazy. Emily’s little checked reactions of impatience or concern were understandable, understood. And, often enough, in the glow of that single flame must have been visible the patient, watching outline of Hugo: yes, it was just as well she had come home - this time, or so it seemed, to look after me, not the other way around.

  I went back into the flat. Emily had gone to bed. Hugo had not gone with her. Pride: and of course she would have understood it. He lay in front of the fire like any domestic beast, nose to the warmth, his green eyes watchful and open. I put my hand out to him and he allowed me a little tremor of his tail. I sat on for a long time, as the fire burned down, and listened to the absolute silence of the building. Yet above me was a farmyard, were animals, were the lethal children, was an old friend, Gerald: I went to bed, wrapping my head as peasants and simple people may do, against thoughts of danger, leaving just my face free - and woke next morning to find no water in the taps.

  The building, as a machine, was dead.

  That morning Gerald came down with two of the children, Redhair and a little black girl. He brought offerings of wine - for he had found an old wine merchant half looted; and some blankets. Also, some food. Emily made the five of us some food, a porridge of some kind, with meat in it: it was good, and comforting.