On Fellows Road Jane paused, listening for movement. He checked behind him but of course the tiger wasn’t there. It would be shambling after him, perhaps having made no more than a hundred yards, but it was coming on and coming on. It had Jane’s stink in its nostrils and it would not be shaken from its pursuit of him. It had the pit-bull grip on him no matter where he was.
It had come out of that chamber like something being born. Mewls and whiffles and whimpers; breath shuffling in its deep wet throat. He had tried to move back but had felt the blades of its claw pinch his flesh and he had halted, knowing that if his skin were pierced he was dead, if not from infection then from the bloodlust that would be triggered by any open wound. The jaws of the tiger stretched wide, its teeth like twists of black glass. The coke-coloured pits of its eyes were ringed with a dry cake of pus. Its fur had long since lost its gloss; now it was like a thin coat, burred, plated with muck, with a novelty pattern picked up for pennies from a charity shop. There was no hint at the power and grace that had once swaggered within it. He’d dropped the heavy hatch cover, trapping one of its legs as it rolled over the lip. It was too much to hope that he’d broken the limb, not that it would matter; nothing seemed to put a check on their movement, except fire.
Once Jane was sure that he was safe he cut down past the side of the third house on the left to the rear where a large garden had once played host to children. A rusted swing with chains hanging free where a plastic seat had once been tethered; the circular frame of a large trampoline now nothing more than a silent mouth open to the sky. He had spent a lot of time, in those early months, searching for his son and finding evidence of thousands of other children. It was like cataloguing grief. There were scorched photograph albums under beds; children’s rooms; playthings torn into nightmare shapes by the heat and the weather. He had found the remains of boys Stanley’s age. Some of them were huddled into the far corners of their rooms, the flayed skeleton of a favoured toy in their famished hands. Teeth clenched on a final word, bitten off by pain. Daddy. He had to stop. It was so deeply sad. He wasn’t sleeping but whenever he managed to it didn’t last long: there was always some blistered bug-eyed thing slinking about in the shadows of his head, limping and stumbling towards him on limbs half devoured by fire.
Jane checked the wall next to the back door. Orange. Inside he moved through a dark hallway almost to the front of the house, his fingers trailing against the failing wallpaper. An edge. He stopped and put his hand to a point halfway down the wall. He pressed hard and fast and felt a magnetic shutter sink slightly against its seal. When he let go, the edge sprang clear of its flush join with the walclass="underline" the jib door opened, breathing its musk against him, a smell he never grew tired of sampling. That air had been trapped in here for decades. It was the whiff of safety.
It was really little more than a false wall, but the space was big enough, and long enough to contain a fold-up camp bed, a chair and a narrow table. Jane had a candle burning on the table now. Next to it he’d rested his naked foot; he was prodding the tender flesh of his ankle. A purple bruise encircled it. In places the black indents of claws remained. He had been mighty close to being punctured, but all seemed OK. Regardless, Jane cleansed the skin – revolted by the memory of its filthy entrapment – with alcohol wipes and bandaged it. His foot wrapped in startlingly clean cotton, his fright and exhaustion allayed somewhat by a bracer of vodka, Jane rubbed his eyes and reached for his bible. The Ordnance Survey map was folded tight and secured in a home-made flap in the back cover with elastic bands. He spread it out on the table and plucked the envelope from his wallet. The candlelight shivered for a moment, as if shuddering in sympathy at the tedious task ahead of Jane. Sometimes it took mere seconds: the shape of the paper almost drawing itself to the conjunction of roads that formed its boundaries and from which it had been traced. Other times he would sit blankly for hours like a man with a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that he was convinced belonged to another box. Now he slowly slid that cipher across the map with the tip of his forefinger. Everyone who was committed to the resistance had a copy of this map, published in 1968, or a facsimile of it; teams of copiers had spent days tracing the streets and key features onto sheets of paper. He’d been treated with disdain when he suggested that all maps would contain the same basic shapes. Why not use those? Because they won’t have this map, the Shaded told him. And what’s wrong with being as cautious as you can be?
This particular fragment reminded Jane of a dog in full flight, its legs off the floor, its head out flat and intent. Three black dots signified buildings. One of the dots was circled with red ink: the next location for the temporary headquarters. Sometimes there were complaints about what appeared to be an overly cautious knee-jerk response to the threat of attacks that didn’t necessarily occur. What was the point of this constant seven-day scramble for a new HQ when the old one was perfectly safe, perfectly serviceable? Jane knew it was all cosmetic, a façade to keep people busy, to keep their minds away from the open sore of a future not worth living for. None of the gardens they had tried to cultivate was coming on. Food was scarce. All of the talk at the meetings, of trying to grow phytoplankton in the ocean to absorb the carbon dioxide in the air, of building a machine to either blow away or suck in the cloud, countless other geo-engineering options from the possible to the outlandish, had come to naught. People had already spurned the rations offered by the resistance and had moved out of London, hoping to find richer pickings in Bristol or Birmingham or Manchester. Everyone was aware that to walk now was to go to your death, but that didn’t stop people. There was the illusion of positive action. It was better than hiding out with a fistful of crumbs, not knowing if you were going to wake up in the morning with some vibrating shredded head trying to gnaw a path to your vitals.
‘Got you,’ he muttered as the piece of paper found its echo on the map. Some bright spark had decided to take everyone for a hike. Jane wished someone had decided to limit their travels to the A406 ring road rather than the larger ripple of the M25, but there had been a clamour for a greater range of options. There was the feeling of being constricted. That damned circle. A feeling of a noose around the throat.
‘Heathrow it is, then.’
Jane napped briefly and woke up to find most of the night gone. He shifted in his chair, hoping it was the wood and not one of his own joints that was creaking. Fear cosied up to him and he stood up, wincing at the familiar aches and pains. He thought of that shambling tiger on England’s Lane. Softlee, softlee, catchee monkey, the tortoise to his hare. He felt his skin pucker.