‘I won’t be here.’
Jacob passed Magnus one of the doorstop sandwiches he had made.
‘Perhaps you’ll come back.’
Magnus bit into cheddar and home-made pickle. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I don’t blame you, I suppose, but you’d be a valuable asset to a new community like ours.’ The priest sat on the step of the combine. He took off his glasses, though the sun was still skull-cracking sharp and his eyes creased against its glare. ‘I know what Jeb was convicted of, but I don’t really know anything about you.’
Magnus looked across the fields. The flatness of the land gave the illusion that you could see for ever, but there were plenty of places for people to hide among the long corn and he wondered if anyone was watching them.
‘I was a comic. I was doing okay and had the potential to do better. I might have been at a turning point in my career, or it might have been another false dawn. I’ll never know.’
The priest’s eyes were almost as blue as the sky. Like bits of broken glass, his wife had said. He asked, ‘Why were you in prison?’
Magnus’s sandwich caught in his throat. He coughed, tried to swallow and coughed again. When he had caught his breath he asked, ‘How did you know?’
The priest sat with his legs stretched out in front of him. He bit into his doorstop as if he were at a Sunday-school picnic that had done away with daintiness.
‘I didn’t. I just made a guess.’
Magnus shook his head at his own stupidity. ‘I was innocent. I hadn’t gone to trial and when I did, I would have been released.’
The priest had finished his sandwich. He took an apple out of his bag and polished it against his shirt. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’
‘What’s the point?’
Jacob glanced at his apple, rubbed it against his shirt some more and then bit into its flesh. ‘I want to be able to trust you.’
It was difficult to know where to begin and so Magnus told him about the Dongolite falling beneath the train, the drunken evening in Johnny Dongo’s hotel room, the fist Johnny had put in his face and the man pawing at the drugged girl in the alleyway. Once he had begun, Magnus found he needed to go on and so he told the priest about Pete dying slowly in the bunk beneath him, the man he had hit — killed — with the fire extinguisher. He even found himself telling Jacob about his father, caught in the blades of the combine and his cousin Hugh, walking into the sea, until the water covered him and the rocks in his backpack dragged him under. Magnus stopped suddenly, feeling lighter, but knowing that shame would soon follow. The priest tossed his apple core into the field beyond.
‘The absence of so many people makes the past seem stronger. We need to grieve, but we need to start making a future too.’ He took his Ray-Bans from his pocket and fingered them, as if he needed to give his hands something to do. ‘I thought about telling Father Wingate my suspicions, he’s my spiritual adviser.’ Jacob smiled. ‘We’re each other’s spiritual advisers. But however wise he is, he’s an old man who has been through a lot. He views the coming of the sweats as an opportunity to build a better society. I’m not sure what discovering there is still wickedness in the world might do to him.’ The priest looked up at Magnus, his eyes narrowed against the sun. ‘I had my suspicions about Melody’s death before we found Henry. There was something about the position of the chair she supposedly stood on to hang herself. It was lying too far from her body. I marked the spot and after we buried her I experimented with it. I’m taller and stronger than Melody was, but no matter how many times I kicked that chair away, it always fell short of where it was lying when we found her. I asked Henry if he had moved it, but he swore blind he hadn’t. At the time I convinced myself he had forgotten he’d done it. He was in a state of shock. But now that we’ve found Henry…’
Magnus said, ‘What’s keeping you here? Why don’t you leave?’
The priest put on his sunglasses, hiding his eyes again behind their dark lenses.
‘We have a perfect spot. Father Wingate’s right, it has the potential to be one of the foundations of a new society.’
‘There are other perfect spots.’
‘Which will also present their own problems. I’ve never been one for running away. If someone is killing people then I’d rather find them.’
There was something final in the priest’s voice. Magnus said, ‘What will you do with them, if you find them?’
The priest took a last swig from his water bottle and screwed its cap back on. He looked across the fields, as if he too wondered if anyone was watching them.
‘I was always a New Testament man, but we seem to find ourselves in Old Testament times.’
Twenty-Nine
Raisha came to him that night. The image of her tramping the countryside, seeking dead children to bury, had lodged itself in Magnus’s mind. He had wondered how he would be if she were to seek him out — could he stand hands that had cradled rotting flesh caressing his flesh? He was asleep when Raisha clicked open the bedroom door. A gust of cool air entered with her and Magnus woke a moment before she pulled back his sheets and slid naked into bed beside him. He flinched and she whispered, ‘Is it okay?’
Magnus had begun to think of Raisha as a ghost flitting across the landscape in search of other ghosts, but now that she was beside him he could feel the heat of her body, the soft smoothness of her skin.
‘It’s okay,’ he answered, keeping his voice low, though there was no one there to hear or care what they did. He wanted to tell her that he would be leaving soon, but then her mouth was on his, warm and sweet, with no hint of the grave.
A shaft of sunlight stretched into his room at dawn and prised Magnus’s eyes apart. Raisha was gone. The sensation of having been used and cast away struck him as a feminine one, and he tried to be amused by it, but the feeling haunted him for the rest of the day, a kernel of sadness wedged in his chest that the motion of the combine could not dislodge.
There were four of them on the harvest crew now. Will and Belle worked the cut field gathering bales of corn with the aid of a forklift and a truck; a no-health-and-safety-team-of-two. Magnus and Jacob took turns on the combine, Magnus instructing the priest who learned quickly.
In the old days, before mechanisation, harvest time had forced communities to unite in hard work. Technology had killed that necessity. Magnus’s father had complained about mega-farms and their obsessions with yields, but he had loved the ease of the combine, the blades that could fell a crop quicker than the sweats had felled London. Magnus tried to conjure his father’s voice, but it was lost in the din of the engine.
Magnus remembered black-and-white photographs of his great-grandfather tilling his field behind a horse-drawn plough. He had risen with the dawn and gone to bed when the sun set. The misery of the long-bright, short-dark, repetitions of the seasons washed over him. London had been alive. Now it and all the other great cities, Paris, New York, Beijing, Mumbai and Moscow, were nothing but names on old radio dials. The loss of it all hit him again. If Magnus had been alone he might have stopped the combine and wept, but the priest was there and so he set his jaw and pressed on through the falling corn.
The sun was fading into a rose-blush sunset when they eventually arrived back at the big house. Father Wingate had promised to cook ‘something hearty’ for their return. ‘Something hearty’ turned out to be a large pot of brown lentils and another of brown rice. Father Wingate said a hurried grace over the food before slopping generous servings into bowls.