Wolves Page 23

  ‘“The scene was peaceful. Natural. This was the land as it had been, before the improvers and mechanics and engineers got hold of it, turning it to human use. For all the years men had worked and lived here, this landscape had lain in wait, encysted, weathering the drought occasioned by human progress, longing to be remembered.”’

  ‘Who’s that then?’

  ‘It’s you. Twat. Your first book.’

  Michel makes a face. ‘What can I say? The copy-editor really got her teeth into that one.’

  We stand together in silence, watching patches of light and darkness play upon the water. Michel’s happiness is palpable. After years of waiting and dreaming, his wish has been granted – the sea has come to him.

  Me? I wish I had been braver, all those years ago. Even now Hanna and I might be on a boat together, tacking timidly about the poorer and more broken parts of the earth—

  ‘Help me with the boat.’

  The rowboat is hidden under a screen of branches, well away from the waterline. We run the constant risk here of having our kit float off on an unexpected swell. Maps offer only the crudest idea of how the marsh will spread. The neglect and collapse of the old agricultural drainage changes the shape of the shoreline week by week.

  The trailer is hidden a short distance away, to discourage thieves. Winching the boat onto the trailer is the hardest part of the job, and the one that takes the most time. Michel frets at this; he fears our exposure here.

  ‘Relax,’ I tell him, gluey fingers weaving the air. For the moment, we are ahead of the curve, invisible to all unweaponised eyes.

  At the waterline, we take our leave. ‘You know how to find me,’ he says, hugging me. At the last minute, it has come home to him that he does not want to live alone.

  We kiss. I cradle his chin in my hand. ‘You said that come the End Times, it would be every man for himself.’

  ‘I did. Give my love to Agnes and Hanna.’

  ‘I will.’

  We stow the rucksacks into the bottom of the boat. Michel seats himself in the bows and unships the oars. A subtle current bears him home, away from me, over flooded levels. I follow him along the shoreline a little way, to where the ground grows soft, and rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees.

  He will not thank me for this – for attracting attention like this – but I do it anyway. I wave goodbye to him.

  Michel still visits his wife and child.

  Picture it:

  The gate is flimsy, a hollow bar of moulded plastic, and a gust of wind has brought it down, or maybe the bull-bars of a speeding 4by4. The gatehouse, a burned-out ruin, stinks of piss.

  He climbs the slippery decking stairs to Hanna and Agnes’s door. The door has a new lock. He lets himself in anyway. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Michel?’

  Hanna comes through from the kitchen.

  Michel kisses her cheek.

  She says, ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘Sure,’ Michel says.

  ‘Come into the kitchen. You’ve missed Agnes.’

  ‘I can tell.’

  ‘She’s round at Libby’s. Do you want me to call her, tell her you’re here?’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  Agnes is twelve. She is afraid of Daddy now. Just a little. Just enough to count. Michel says, ‘I came to see you’re all right.’

  Money flows in from his properties and copyrights. Most of it goes to his wife and daughter. Deep into his rehearsal of the Fall, his training, Michel does not need much money.

  They live in separate worlds now, Hanna and Michel. Perhaps they always did. Hanna never did credit the sincerity of Michel’s dreams of collapse. She has always found them childish.

  Once again Michel seeks to persuade her. ‘I just want you both to be safe.’

  ‘To survive.’

  All their meetings end this way, however light they try to keep things. It is the tenor of the times. Most everyone has an opinion about this now. The coming Fall.

  ‘Yes. To survive.’

  ‘If that is possible.’ She tries to meet his eye. Michel believes in survival. It is why he is so strong now, so muscled, so tanned. He looks as though he has toppled out of one of his own book covers.

  The redoubt is nearly done, he says. Wood and lathe and stone. A real house, really hidden, against the day the supermarket shelves run empty and civilisation, having cruised along for millennia, collapses in the space of a day. This happens. Cultures do collapse. The Harappans. Egypt’s Old Kingdom. The Teotihuacans burned down their city in a ritual fire. The Olmec buried themselves.

  Michel has done what he can. He has promised his family rooms in the fortress he is building, half-in, half-out of the earth. When things fail and fall, it will be up to families to survive, he says. Families and clans. Michel is very persuasive. (You don’t get sales figures like his, you don’t get option deals, unless you have something simple and compelling to say.)

  But let’s be honest here – Hanna is the tougher of these two. She has to be. She has a daughter to look after. She has no choice but to live in the everyday world, with all its prompts to fear and denial and secession. ‘How did you get in, anyway?’ she asks, examining the front door.

  ‘You’ve had trouble?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To be fitting new locks.’

  ‘No. No trouble.’ She studies the mechanism, unnerved by her husband’s burglar’s skills, and, by extension, all the brutal lore he lives by now, and which she will not learn.

  ‘The thing is, Hanna, it still just about makes sense for people to be kind and decent to each other. But this will change, and it will change on a penny.’

  ‘I know this is what you think, Michel. You have told me this before. You keep saying this.’

  ‘We have to be ready.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No. You think you know. You don’t know.’

  Hanna sighs. She can only stomach so much of this sort of thing. ‘I’ll give Agnes your love, Mick. Please fuck off now.’

  ‘Hanna.’

  ‘Go back to your boyfriend. Go back to Connie. Go on.’

  TWENTY

  Whatever this is – ruin or renaissance – the future hurls itself at us piecemeal, raising some of us, hurling others down. The future is not democratic. In cities to the east of the country, people are still living out the kind of lives I remember from my childhood.

  It’s bloody cold here, but for some reason nobody wears much. I go into a cafeteria to buy a take-out coffee and at the tables sit young builders in plaster-spattered Ts and bare-legged shop assistants. Just looking at them makes me shiver. I try to pay with a card. Stupid of me. The girl behind the counter just stares.

  The town, built entirely of brick, is the colour of old blood. I stuff my free hand into the pocket of my puffer jacket and tug its stuffing around my middle. I’m cold to the core. It’s not just the weather. The train was a sleeper in name only, the banquettes were cripplingly uncomfortable and I’ve slept very badly.

  Or maybe it’s just that I’m old. Older. Anyway, old enough for my age to matter: at forty, the age my mother was when she died. Sara. I drink my coffee, burn my tongue, don’t care.

  There is a taxi rank by the station but after two drivers refuse my fare I haul out a pair of glasses. I blink up a map and a green arrow unfurls along the pavement before me. The colour contrast between the map’s Caribbean-coloured 3D rendering and the town’s scabby frontages is so distressing I have to pause to blink up the preferences pane.

  ‘Got the time, mate?’

  I’m equipped for this. Laboriously, I haul on the sleeve of my puffer and study my cheap plastic watch.

  I’ve been caught out before and mugged. Not today. This place has a reputation, and I have come forewarned. Old watch, old shoes, and all I need I’m carrying in a canvas shopping bag – the paranoid preparedness of the middle-aged. The kid pulls a face and doesn’t even wait for my reply. As I thought, it’s just been
a ruse to get me to haul out my phone. My spectacles he doesn’t clock, or maybe they have no resale value in this place – it lags so far behind the curve.

  The arrow, blue now, leads me to the cliffs. The town, in the days of its pride, made rigorous, geometric shapes out of their slopes and hollows, locking everything in brick. This mathematical neatness makes everything look smaller and nearer than it is. I’m exhausted by the time I reach the sea.

  Tenements edge the cliff like long brown teeth. It’s as well I have this map running. The road signs have long since been pilfered for their scrap value. Derelict telephone poles, their wires torn away, stand nude and useless on each corner.

  Far away a talk-radio station, its volume cranked up and fuzzy with distortion, attempts to comfort the streets. Broken glass shines in the gutters as I cross and climb a stairwell – brick, of course, and even in this biting cold, sharp with old urine.

  There is a pile of dog faeces on the external landing. I step around it. Many of the flats are gutted, their doors and windows stoppered with magnolia-painted metal sheeting.

  Those still occupied have had their house-numbers wrenched off. The number I’m looking for, 717, has been scratched over the door’s paintwork in biro. There is no bell. I bang on the door and wait for an answer. I’m half-expecting him to peer out at me from behind the ash-grey nets, but no, he comes to the door readily enough, no chain, no dog, as if he was expecting me.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  He stands there, staring at me. It has been a long time since we last saw each other. Most of my life. He’s grey now. Not just his hair. His skin is the colour of blurred newsprint. It is smothered in fine lines. ‘You’d better come in,’ he says, not moving. When I step forward, he steps back.

  Perhaps he did expect me. I chose the day carefully, after all – the anniversary of Mum’s death. After a lifetime thinking about her, about what she did to herself, I am now, second by second, growing older than her. I have survived her. Every moment now is a bonus. I am going to enjoy myself.

  The smell of damp wrestles with the smell of stale cigarettes for domination of the air. Ben has compensated for his circumstances by filling the flat with other, better worlds. There are books everywhere. Travel magazines and Sunday supplements teeter in piles against the walls. There isn’t anywhere to sit down beyond a hollow-bottomed leather couch under the lounge window, and Ben paddles his way towards that ahead of me, desperate as a drowning seaman striking out for the lifeboat.

  I stay standing.

  Ben blinks up at me. ‘Well.’

  The radio is on. The voice is one I recognise.

  ‘How are you?’

  I don’t answer. I am listening to the programme. It is. It is Mandy. She’s on a review show, discussing some exhibition I’m never going to see. She likes it. She’s employing words like ‘revenant’ and ‘spiky’. It’s nice to hear her being so positive about something.

  ‘Conrad?’

  ‘Do you mind if we have the radio off?’

  One thing about Mandy – she has staying power. Last year you couldn’t turn your computer on without there being some banner trailer for her memoir creeping down the side of your screen on creepy, eight-fingered hands. She mentioned me, but glancingly – a minor lover of her early life, before the accident sewed her into her current, compelling form.

  Ben snaps the radio off. He sits down. He swallows. He is very thin, strung out on whatever medicines are crowding the table by his side. ‘How are you?’

  I won’t say anything to that. What would be the point? His eyes rove over me, a father’s instinct kicking in. Bit by bit, you can see it register with him – my cheap clothing, my cap, my worn boots. The size of me.

  Some bit of forgotten etiquette heaves into view behind his eyes. ‘Do you want something to drink?’

  ‘It’s all right, Ben.’

  He looks relieved. I wonder if there’s anything at all in his kitchen. I’m tempted to ask him to show me around. ‘This is the living room. This is the master bedroom.’ I can see well enough how he lives – enough to know that I will never be able to add measurably to his burdens. It is hard for me, and not at all reassuring, to discover that life has exacted its own revenge upon him. I thought that was going to be my job. Now I’m here, there doesn’t seem much point.

  I tell him what I know. How I tried to contact him, in the weeks after Mandy’s accident, but that he had never returned my calls. Even after all this work I cannot pinpoint exactly where his trail of phone numbers and forwarding addresses slid off into fiction.

  Ben shakes his head, whether in denial, or because he can’t himself remember, hardly matters now. The clinic he worked at, abandoning me to Poppy’s care towards the end of my time at school – that was real enough. Even the job checked out. And the one after that. And the one after that.

  By then, though, Dad had been reduced to some sort of high-grade janitor. After that his work record melted away into casual three-month contracts at this clinic, that care-home, each one further away than the last – he had moved across the public health network like a nomadic fisherman, following the seasons from pond to pond. Even his applications for criminal record checks (spotless, always) petered out in the end. The last six years are completely unaccounted for.

  Will I look like this, when I am his age? So small, and, well, pointed? Like some small forest mammal, poking its snout up above the leaves. His presence is disturbing. It is so much less powerful than his absence has been.

  I am strong now. Michel has toughened me. I could break him across my knee like a twig. I tell him, ‘I hired a professional,’ and I want to enjoy the way his face quivers, but to be honest all I can feel is a faint and guilty disgust.

  I’ve been paying Cobb for a private investigation. He seemed to me a reasonable man. Vaux, with all the resources at his disposal, had employed him – this was as good as a recommendation.

  Cobb, when he wasn’t putting the virtual frighteners on me, turned out to be a pleasant, heavy-drinking ex-submariner on his second career and his third divorce. It took him no time at all to track Ben down. He found him managing a state-funded care home, a former B&B on the coast east of here. When Cobb phoned to tell me, he boasted that he hadn’t even had to leave his desk. The work had proved so easy for him, he offered me a discount.

  By the time I got up the guts to follow Cobb’s lead, however, Dad had lost the job, the care home was closed down, and its elderly clientele were dispersed and absorbed. Dad’s easy enough to find now that he’s drawing his minuscule state pension.

  ‘You know what day it is. Don’t you?’ I could be harder with him if I wasn’t having to stand over him. Looming like this, everything that comes out of my mouth, however innocuous, acquires the power of a threat. I sit on one arm of the sofa, and he shifts backwards against the other arm, edging away from me. I want to shed my puffer jacket but these kinds of places can’t afford heat, and our breaths are coming out in clouds.

  Dad seems to have acquired some of the district’s hardiness, making do in a red lumberjack shirt, the collar turned up to hide the wattle of his neck. He offers me a cigarette. Nothing dates him more than this – the genteel suicide aid of a vanishing generation. ‘I know what day it is.’ He takes a lighter from the table. A medicine canister topples onto its side. He ignores it and inhales, dragging the flame into his cigarette.

  ‘You knew I found her. In the boot of the car. You knew I saw her there.’

  Ben closes his eyes. Is this suffering, or is he reliving a painful moment of the past? It could be he’s just savouring his cigarette. With a face like his, it’s impossible to tell. Its mask of habitual suffering hides any ephemeral emotion.

  ‘I can tell you about it if you want.’

  The story comes out of him easily, without any kind of struggle. I don’t know whether to believe it or not. There are details which ring with such a nice irony, I wonder whether life can really have thrown them up. The bag, he says, was hers. The
plastic bag, wrapped round her head with packing tape. It’s how he found her – after racing to her aid, frantically trying to make sense of her confused directions. (‘I’m in a phonebox.’)

  How Sara’s bipolar trajectory had kiltered so far off its usual orbit, driving her to try suicide even before she made it to the camp, Ben can only speculate. ‘I got her to take her pills,’ he says. ‘Before she went to the camp. It was a deal we had.’ Blaming iatrogenic medicine again. Presumably this is a trick he learned off her.

  He found her in a motel room, the evening after she left. He knocked on the door and the door was already open. Perhaps she wanted to be found and rescued. Perhaps this was her cry for help.

  The bed was a pool of vomit, with here and there frothy little islands of half-dissolved aspirin. Sara had passed out. The bag crackled as it rose and fell against her face. It was torn.

  How long he sat there beside her, he cannot now remember. Eventually, borne down by the weight of things, he reached for a pillow and pressed it over her face until she stopped moving.

  He picked her up in his arms and carried her down the corridor to the lobby. It was empty. He laid her down on the sofa by the door and went to the desk and rang the bell.

  No-one came.

  He waited. He doesn’t know how long. In the end he picked her up again and carried her out to the car. He laid her on the back seat and looked up the location of the nearest hospital on his phone. He drove there and sat in the hospital car park all night. An edge of blue touched the horizon, and he remembered me. He pulled Sara off the back seat and laid her in the boot of the car. He drove home. He came home in time to see me safely to school.

  ‘Come on, Connie. Up and at ’em.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘Oh, Connie.’

  ‘I was fifteen.’

  ‘Conrad.’ He squeezes me. He has his arms round me. Strange, that I should be here now, on the sofa, pressed against him, his arms around me as though I was a child. Is this, after everything, what I have come here for? Can the body betray the mind so far? One thing I know – I can no longer bear it. The smell of him. The past. I push away from him, as I have never felt able to push away as a child. I am grown and he is old. At last, and more than twenty years too late, I push away.