Emma said, “How long, do you think, before we have the same problems up here?”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Maybe never.”
“Yeah, right,” Emma chided him. “Looks like it.”
The town centre was deserted. When the clock struck the hour, Emma jumped and the sound flew through the empty streets, carrying its cold, lonely message.
Cars had been abandoned on the roads, some of them having flipped onto the pavement or been involved in minor collisions with other vehicles. In one of the more serious accidents, a woman had been trapped in the driver’s seat of her Mini by the steering wheel, which had been pushed forwards into her chest by the force of a bus’s impact. A fire had broken out and ravaged her. Smoke rose from her charred remains. Her eyes swivelled as Sean and Emma walked past, and followed their progress along Sankey Street. Emma thought she was grinning at them but felt something rise in her throat when she realised it was only because her lips had been burned away.
At the town hall Sean broke away from Emma and jogged towards the taxi rank. The lawns of Bank Park surrounding the town hall were in need of a trim. A lawnmower had been left in the middle of the task. A single gardening glove lay next to it, bright orange in the green.
There were no drivers in the taxis, but more than one had failed to take the keys out before leaving their cab. Getting into one, he started up the engine – a shocking roar that broke the silence – and swung the cab out of the queue, halting in front of Emma, who climbed into the back.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Farmhouse,” Sean replied. “Somewhere I saw a gathering of my softstrip friends some time ago. I didn’t get a chance to go in and look around. But I think that’s where their HQ is.”
The streets radiating out of town shed their drifts of traffic until the route was relatively unimpeded. Emma saw dark figures in windows looking down on the cab as it wound its way towards the dual carriageway. The houses in these terraced streets seemed to be affected by the tension in the air, the loss of community. They hunched together, seeking safety in numbers, and closed their eyes to the outside world. Their hard, cement faces found sympathy in Sean’s and – Emma noticed in the rear-view mirror – her own.
The dual carriageway became a road became a track littered with leaves and mud. On either side, ploughed fields spread out, their furrows parallel to the road, perspective sucking all of their lines to a point straight ahead where a farmhouse with a sunken, defeated look sat waiting for them.
Sean ditched the car half a mile shy of the building, having turned it to face the opposite direction. He pocketed the keys and they took to the field. Hunched low to the ground they slowly neared the farmhouse, their breathing becoming more laboured, hanging like empty speech bubbles around their heads.
It was late in the afternoon and the sky was heavily bruised but no lights had come on in the farmhouse.
“We could be in luck,” Sean said. “It might be empty.”
“Wait,” she said. She drew him to her under the protective spread of an oak tree made naked by the cold. The bark of the tree was true and good. Somebody had carved their name in the wood, an ancient graffito professing love for another. The person who had scratched that wish might well be dead now. Emma clung to her man and her skin felt as crumbly and delicate as the tree’s. Sean had made his mark on it long ago, before he was aware of her, branding her with his heat. She had felt the scorch of it deep in her heart and she knew the warmth she felt now was partly down to Sean’s arms around her, but also partly due to the core of need he had fixed in her all those years ago. She wanted to make love to him here, now, but it was too cold and he was too focused.
Something about the farmhouse worried her. It might have been the way its slouched windows frowned down at her or the broad door beneath its arch, like an opened mouth. She held on to Sean and rubbed his back, ran her fingers through the clipped fuzz at his nape, and moved her body so that as much of its surface was in alignment with his. She searched for the things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but the look in his eyes told her that he was fully aware of that.
“I don’t like it, Sean,” she whispered. “It doesn’t feel right. I’m not happy.”
Sean pulled back and placed the warm flat of his hand against her cheek. “It’s all right. We’ll be careful. Promise.”
She allowed herself to be escorted closer to the farmhouse, but the nearer they got, the more she felt repelled by the ugly building. Red curtains in the windows reminded her of the freshly harvested hide of animals her grandfather had hunted during her youth. She remembered one freezing morning in particular when she had been given the treat of accompanying him on a shoot in the fields near his house. She had trotted happily alongside him, the memory of the warmth of her bed lost to her but for a crumb of sleep in the corner of her eye and her pyjamas, which she had refused to take off and which provided an extra layer of warmth beneath the jumper and coat and trousers.
The sky had a bleached look about it. The sun was imminent, a burst yolk dribbling across the horizon. Chalky scratches in the blue told of aircraft nosing towards somewhere far away and much warmer than this starved place. Emma had gabbed away at the hawkish profile of her grandfather as he stalked across the frozen ridges of the field, shotgun broken across his arm, heading towards the mist-bound acres of the wood at its far end. She couldn’t remember what she had talked about – her dolls, maybe, or an enjoyable painting session at school. But she remembered turning around when the church bells tolled six to see the quickening sun pull the shine out of the spire and the clockface. For a moment, the church seemed to be on fire, and then she heard a mighty crack and she whirled to see her grandfather’s gun slotting smoothly into the cushion of his shoulder. She caught a brief glimpse of movement high to her right, a flutter of wings, and then came the explosion of the gun and she screamed, tears in her eyes before the retort’s echoes had spent themselves on the field’s furrows and fences.
He sent her to collect the downed wood pigeon and she did so, not because she wanted to – she could have been the definition of squeamish in the dictionary – but because her grandfather, in that moment, though she loved him enormously, had scared her more than anything else in her short life. His face had retained its shadows despite the sun’s attempts to pick them out. The smoke from his shotgun coiled around him, snagging on his clothes, his jaw, as if its true home was inside his body and it was struggling to return.
She picked the bird up by its legs and was grateful that there didn’t seem to be any blood, but when she had returned to her grandfather and he took the bird from her, she saw a streak of it on her hand. Her grandfather lifted it off with a thumb and daubed it against her forehead.
Sean said. “What is it?”
Emma touched the spot on her forehead and took a step back. “I can’t go in,” she said. “I won’t go in.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. But you know I have to.”
She nodded. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
He handed her the keys. “Go and sit in the cab,” he said. “Wait for me. I’ll be no more than fifteen minutes. If I’m not back by then, drive away and get the police. Tell them anything. Tell them you saw a murder here. Get a lot of police out here.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Sean kissed her hair and her mouth. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. He turned his back on her.