Helen nodded in the darkness, and for a moment Theo thought he could hear her expression, hear the twitching of her lips. “Sound advice that. Stuff of sense.”
Theo stared into an endless sky, and neither of them had anything more to say on the subject.
In the night in the dead of night in the dead place where the dead moved in the forest in the
A burst of torchlight an explosion of men and women they came from nowhere and they filled the world behind the torchlight they came from the dark they
grabbed Helen by the hair grabbed Theo by the throat they
there were dogs and torches and someone possibly had a gun but even if they didn’t they were
and they shouted and pushed and pulled at skin and faces and there weren’t really any questions in there just a lot of noise and that made it hard to answer and
they were pulled through the dark the dogs nipping at their heels the men half-running along gravel paths there was
a farmhouse where no lights shone and the skull of a sheep was nailed to the letterbox and there were
two trucks, the headlights on, the engines running, and
Theo was put in one Helen in the other he called out and tried to grab her hand, knew if he didn’t that he really would be a failure the greatest failure in the history of mankind
but they pulled them apart and he went in one and she went in the other and when he tried to see where they were going, someone kicked him in the ribs and it really bloody hurt
so he did as he was told, and stayed on the floor, one leg tucked to his chin the other stretched out behind and wondered if these people knew what it meant to make like a heron and whether they
Dawn, grey through the square open canvas at the back of the truck.
Someone turned the radio on and it was really bad pop, the pop played at a disco for the old folks who used to be sexy back when flares were in fashion and before the moonwalk made all the young things scream.
Theo realised he was sleeping, and the thought was so astonishing that he jerked wide awake.
One man in the truck
no—a boy
—no! A woman. Her hair cut short, tall and skinny but with a face that could have been a boy if she’d wanted, could have been a youthful beautiful boy but look at her hands, long fingers around her rifle she is
Praying.
Her words half-caught, a whisper between the rattle of the suspension as they bounce through potholed, ravaged roads.
“For those who lived for those who died,” she whispers. “For the children born to the sun for the ones who lie beneath the old man’s moon for those who…”
Theo prays.
He prays to the dead, who he thought he was helping and was almost certainly letting down.
He prays to his daughter, that one day she will open her eyes and see the sun and there will be only radiance on her face.
Knows he’s absolutely fine with dying, as long as it’s for her.
Neila prays.
To those she wronged to those she helped to the world she thinks she helped build, not in any spectacular form not in war or stone or blood or iron or
but in her deeds.
In her choices.
In the kindness bestowed on others there is a world somewhere where the children will be different from the kids of her days.
Dani gave up praying a long time before she died, but then, just before the end, there was a moment when she got on her knees to a deity unknown, to an idea that needed to be real and…
If Helen prays, she keeps her prayers to herself.
They came to a place called Newton Bridge.
It had begun with a bridge across a river. The bridge was stone and mortar, and horses and carts went across it, carrying cotton, mostly, which they wove at the watermill, before the businessmen discovered it was cheaper to pay for coal and build factories in places where the workforce was plentiful and less likely to go on strike.
Then for a while the bridge wasn’t crossed very much, except by the shepherds who roamed the hills and the farmers who built the walls that divided the fields.
Then one day it fell down and stayed broken.
And then one day it was rebuilt, restored even, only a bit of ironwork underneath to give a clue as to the industrial labours that went into its repair.
And then one day the town got a sponsor, a company specialising in executive glamping, and wooden huts were built on the edge of the village beneath the trees that spread morning shade and people came and drank red wine and it was all terribly lovely until the railway company stopped sending trains down the slow line.
And then the company left.
As did the doctor, teacher, vet, rubbish man, hairdresser, plumber, electrician—pretty much anyone, really, anyone who could get out, and only the buildings remained.
For a little while.
They pulled Theo from the truck with busy hands and roaring faces, which seemed unnecessary given he wasn’t going anywhere else.
Pulled Helen down too, for a moment he called out her name but she was pulled away, up a street towards a grey concrete hall that maybe had been a library once, or perhaps some sort of council office where they sorted the tax and where now…
He couldn’t see what now. Dragged down to the river, to the old watermill, pushed through a door onto a wooden floor, an abandoned bar where once they’d made cream teas or home-made fudge and where now the dust was imprinted with different shapes of trailing hands and doodles made with fingertips.
Locked the door.
Left him there a while.
Theo waited, knees huddled to his chin.
Shadows moved and though he couldn’t see them moving, every time he checked they’d travelled a little bit further and he waited.
Theo waits.
The door opens.
Helen steps inside. Perhaps it’s her face, or something of her dignity, but they’re not in such a hurry to push her around.
Perhaps it’s his face, and his lack of dignity, maybe that’s the swing of things.
“Just tell them the truth,” she murmured quickly as a man in an oversized tweed jacket and rubber boots picked Theo up by the arm. “Tell them the truth.”
They led Theo outside, locked the door behind him, leaving Helen to watch the shadows. He wondered if she’d see them moving, even if he couldn’t.
Pulled through tight, curling streets up a hill, past shattered windows boarded up with card, children in bare feet who squatted on the pavement and glared, past a patch of ground where geraniums grew amongst the potatoes, an abandoned fire station where now men sat cleaning rifles, a once-fine town hall where the merchants used to gather to argue about the price of wool and where now the old people sat with one tooth per length of pink gum and chewed on air and glared at the passing skies.
Up, to the top of the town and then a little bit beyond, feet stumbling on muddy paths, to a cottage between the trees.
The cottage lay within a stone wall. In the garden the owner grew tomatoes, the vines long since plucked, and potatoes, and carrots, and cabbage. On the windowsills there were nasturtiums, blue cornflowers and trailing crimson-streaked dangles of ivy. Above the low front door was a pottery sign which said HOME SWEET HOME. Solar panels sat on the roof of the house, a tendril of cable running from them and heading back down into the village. Smoke carrying the smell of burning wood rose from a crooked chimney. A woman was tending the flowers. Wearing yellow rubber gloves she squashed the plague of black-bodied aphids that clung to the green stems of the nasturtiums, squeezing and scraping in oily genocide. Her hair was a faded yellow, spread through with oncoming white. Her chin rolled down into a secondary flange of flesh that bobbed in and out of existence as her neck moved. Her shoulders were broad, her legs were short, she wore a dark red body warmer over a torn grey woolly jumper, a brown skirt that stopped just above her knees and green boots that started just below, revealing a hint of expanding, pasty joint. She didn’t pay the men much attention as they deposited Theo on her garden path, but kept on tending her flowers, peering under leaves and fading yellow petals in her quest to exterminate her tiny-bodied enemies.