‘No.’
Emma looked deep into Jackie’s tired face but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was right, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Jackie sensed her unease.
‘Sorry, Emma,’ she mumbled apologetically, ‘I didn’t mean to go off on one like that.’
‘That’s okay,’ she insisted. ‘Really, I understand how you’re feeling but…’
‘Thing is,’ she interrupted, ‘I know how lucky I am to still be here and to still be in one piece, but sometimes that’s not enough. I can handle this most of the time, but now and then I just want my life back.’
34
Wrapped up in a thick winter coat to protect him from the cold and wearing a baseball cap to keep off the intermittent rain, Michael sat on a low stone wall in the darkness and stared into the distance. He was alone, and at that moment that was just how he wanted to be. The only person he wanted to share his company with tonight was miles away.
He’d left the eight other survivors celebrating their day’s work and drinking themselves stupid in the dank, dusty and shadow-filled lounge of The Fox, Cormansey’s only public house.
The sound of the ocean filled the evening air. It was still refreshingly different to actually be able to hear something instead of the heavy, enforced silence he’d endured during pretty much all of the last eight weeks. The constant crashing of the waves on the beach just ahead of him was a welcome and relaxing sound.
He felt safe being out on his own tonight. Last night he wouldn’t have risked being out in the open like this but today the group had worked hard to clear the village and a large number of bodies had been slaughtered and accounted for. From where he was sitting he could still see the bright glow of the huge pyre they’d lit just outside the main part of Danvers Lye. If there were any other bodies nearby tonight (and he guessed that there probably would be) then he knew they would most likely be few and far between and he’d be able to deal with them quickly and easily. In readiness his trusty crowbar remained slung at his side.
Keen to escape from the dead village, Michael had chosen to walk down the twisting coastal road which led back towards the other end of the island. Getting cold, he jumped up from the stone wall where he’d been sitting for the last ten minutes and ambled down towards the sea, his feet grinding noisily into the shingle shore as he neared the ocean. The crashing waves were soon loud enough to drown out the sound of his heavy footsteps.
He’d been busy and preoccupied all day but, now that he’d finally stopped working, he’d again found himself plagued by dark and painful thoughts. Most prevalent in his mind was Emma and the sudden physical gulf which remained between the two of them. Why the hell had he left her on the mainland? Couldn’t she have come over to Cormansey with him? She would have been more use than bloody Danny Talbot. Michael had nothing against Talbot but he was young and immature and he’d been of very little help when the group had been clearing the village earlier.
Emma, on the other hand, was far more experienced. She had guts and she had strength and when it came to the crunch she wasn’t afraid to do whatever she had to do to survive. Looking back now and thinking about some of the survivors sitting in the pub down the road, he decided that some of them seemed to have been chosen to come to the island just because they fitted the stereotypical impression of the kind of person who should have been prepared to fight and clear the land; young, fit and male. A tragic shame, thought Michael, that even now after all that had happened, he and his fellow survivors seemed content to measure themselves and each other according to standards which were once given importance in a society that was long gone.
Michael walked further along the beach. Unlike most of the coastline of Cormansey that he’d seen so far, the shingle here was even and flat and was interrupted by only the occasional large rock. The wreck of a fishing boat had been washed up onto the shore near to where he was walking. He had no way of knowing whether this was a vessel which had originally set sail from Cormansey or whether it had simply drifted and crashed into the rocks here by chance. Wherever it had come from, it had ended its days stranded here on the beach, lying over on one side like a dead whale. As he approached Michael saw that the captain of the boat (if that was who it had been) was still trapped on board. Caught up in rusted winch machinery, the body was particularly badly deteriorated, almost skeletal, no doubt because of its exposure to the harsh and relentless ocean conditions. Almost all of the visible flesh had been stripped away, washed away by the salty sea water and leaving yellow-white bone exposed beneath.
Months ago the discovery of a body such as the one Michael had found would have mattered and the lives of many people would have been affected by the repercussions of the death and the wreck. Today it didn’t mean anything to anyone. Michael pitied the poor sod who had died. It again made him realise just how most of what he had once considered important now counted for nothing.
A dead body washing up on a beach would have been headline news in the days before the world had been turned upside down. Now Michael casually walked past it as if it was nothing more than an unimportant piece of driftwood.
It was getting harder to remember that all of these bodies had each been someone once. Someone with a life, a name, a history and a personality.
Having previously been forced by circumstance to forget about the past, the change of surroundings and the events of the day now ending had unexpectedly revealed a weakness in Michael’s armour. He wasn’t alone - most of the others had felt it too. A subconscious refusal to think about the past had until today remained a key defence for many of the survivors. The unprepared men and women on the island, however, had suddenly been given an opportunity to look back and remember what had gone and what they had lost. As a result uneasy comparisons between the past and what remained today were now being made with unhealthy regularity. Looking back was a bloody hard and painful experience. As Michael ambled further down the beach, the driving wind whipping up off the ocean and gusting furiously into his face, he thought about the life he had lived before this nightmare had begun. He thought about the casual approach he had taken to his life and how nothing much had ever seemed to bother him. He thought about how, like everyone else, he’d always taken pretty much everything for granted. He thought about his family and friends. He thought about his home. He pictured his house in his mind as he’d left it, and then tried to drag that image into the present. He pictured the street where he used to live, now overrun with mould, weeds and decay, the pavements littered with the remains of people he used to know.
As the shingle gave way to larger, jagged and more dangerous rocks, Michael found himself turning his attention to the more immediate past. He remembered the early days and finding the farmhouse with Emma and Carl.
Christ, they should have done better there. He should have been stronger. They’d let themselves down and had made themselves vulnerable. But then, he thought, if the farmhouse hadn’t been surrounded and lost when it had been, surely it would have happened eventually? He thought about the military base and what had happened there, how somewhere which had apparently been so safe, strong and secure could also have been exposed and compromised so quickly and disastrously. Would the island prove to be any safer? He had to believe that it would be. In principle the dangers here were less, but these days the gulf between predictions and reality often proved to be unexpected and immense.
All he wanted was security and shelter. A quiet, simple life with his basic needs satisfied. A roof over his head and Emma by his side was all that it boiled down to.