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 scraped 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.