I caught my breath.
A small bundle.
A pale pink coat, two skinny white legs her toes pointing down buried in the dirt.
I passed the section of road and had to pull over into a layby to collect myself.
Staying tucked up in the village and keeping to the house as much as possible had kept us hidden from this new reality that now surrounded us. I reminded myself to keep calm. I had a long drive ahead of me, and this was probably going to get much worse. We weren’t even five miles from home yet, and already I was dreading the journey. We moved out of the quieter country lanes and onto the main roads leading up to London. Shadow had been sat bolt upright on the back seat since leaving our driveway. His nose hadn’t left the glass of the window as he carefully examined the landscape before him, creating a foggy mist of hot air on the glass in circles around his mouth. Sometimes when I looked at him, I imagined the cogs turning in his head. It was like you could hear him thinking.
Every mile or so there were cars at the side of the road, pulled over on the hard shoulder or grassy verge. The first one we saw I had assumed that the occupants were still inside. Thinking they had stopped driving for a break I slowed the Land Rover down and had crawled past to see if there were other people nearby, but when I looked in the car was empty.
We’d been driving for about twenty minutes before I saw another moving vehicle. It sped up when it saw us coming. Even though we were approaching from the opposite direction. It struck me as strange. Perhaps survivors coming from the London area had thought it best to make their way to the coast? They might be thinking of ways to get across the channel to France. If it was unharmed, then that would be a sensible idea. The fact that we hadn’t seen any foreign aid sent across to us led me to think that France was probably in a similar situation to ours.
Where would we find food now? Britain’s farmland would have been contaminated by the radioactive fallout. Soon we would run out of supermarkets and warehouses to plunder, and that would lead to even more violence. After recent events it was getting easier to imagine.
As we drove closer to the motorway, I began to notice the trees, standing like skeletons. Their leaves were gone. Some were completely bare as though it were late Autumn not the middle of Summer. If my tallying of the days had been correct, then it should be the middle of August right now, despite the temperature outside being much colder. I had put that down to the after-effects of the explosions. Further on I could see trees had been uprooted and were lying scattered across the road. Cars had been abandoned in the middle of lanes. I took my foot off the accelerator and began to weave my way around the stationary traffic. I passed a small blue Vauxhall which had been hit by part of a falling tree. To my horror, I saw that the driver was still inside crushed to his seat by the fallen log and unable to get help, there was no way an ambulance could have gotten out to them. I hoped that whoever it was hadn’t had to wait long for their death.
I drove on. The sights before me were like something out of a film. Something Matt and I would watch on a Saturday night, frightened and curled up together on the sofa. You don’t imagine for one second that you would ever live through a nightmare like the one on the screen. Staring out ahead in a daze, I tried hard not to give too much attention to the upsetting scenes all around me. I concentrated instead on the gaps I could get the car through.
Purposefully distracting my brain, I tried to think of something good. Something happy. My thoughts drifted off to Kate. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to make our way up the country to her place, at least we would be out of the way up there. I knew the area well, I had loved visiting her when she’d moved. There was a time when I’d even considered moving up there myself in the days before my role in Parliament and of course before I had met Matt. Back then, she was all I had.
Funny to think that she may be all Rosa and I had left now, the not knowing was all I could think about. I decided that the only way to know would be to go to his parents’ house and see if there was any evidence that he had been holed up there. Yes, that’s what I would do. It was only another ten miles or so out of my way, and if there was still no sign of him, I would carry on to the Bunker or up to Kate. Imagine if I found him in the Bunker. This could even be what he was hoping we would do.
If his parents were in a desperate situation I knew he wouldn’t leave them on their own, it’s certainly not as if he could have brought them down to us on his motorbike. I felt the heat from the sun coming up in the distance behind me and my spirits rose with it. There was a chance he was still alive out there. There was still hope and hope was all I needed.
The M25 was a mess, the lanes were jam-packed full of cars those people who must have thought they were only twenty minutes away from their destination and had been caught in the traffic, out in the open when the bombs fell. The smell coming from the roadside was the worst I had encountered. There were accidents all over the place, bad ones. Drivers speeding to get to where they needed to be colliding with other drivers desperately phoning loved ones. I could easily imagine it, of course, there was going to be accidents on the road. I just hadn’t been prepared for the aftermath two months after the fact. I kept my mind on finding gaps and moving on from one to the next one methodically. I should be better at this, more prepared. I had seen dead bodies up close before. Two in fact. Mum and Dad.
Mum and Dad had been due to catch a train from London Kings Cross up to see our Aunt in York the day of the London Underground bombings. I remember that day like it was etched on the back of my eyelids, I had been in Kensington prepping for a meeting when I heard what had happened. They opened the pubs early that day. The widescreen TVs which were usually reserved for football were now playing the News instead. Landlords invited people in from the street to watch, giving out free cups of coffee laced with spirits.
I had been in The Hereford Arms in Gloucester Road when my sister called. I had been so absorbed in myself that morning that I hadn’t clocked it, but she had. Kate was like that. She often thought of others before herself. My mobile which had been sitting on top of a beer mat beside me started to vibrate, I picked it up.
“Hi, Kate.”
“I can’t get hold of Mum. Do you know what time their train was to York?” Kate’s words sent a bolt of fear straight through me.
“No I have no idea, I thought they were going up tomorrow?”
“No, it was today, this morning I think.”
“Fuck!”
“Yeah…” My head pounded, my parents could be stuck underground. “Ok listen, I’m taking a black cab up to Kings Cross to see if they’re there. Maybe they had to leave their bags on the train or something, that could be why she isn’t answering her phone.” I listened to my sister reasoning with herself, unable to think of something equally as reasonable. I heard myself say,
“Yes of course. I will meet you there.” She hung up, and I stared blankly at the phone in my hand.
We waited for days before we were able to identify them. We did it together although Kate took charge. She handled everything, I was just in shock existing only as a silent witness. I hoped that I had brought her some comfort just by being there, but I was so trapped in my own head that I’m not sure that I did.
So seeing death and disaster wasn’t totally new to me but the scale of this was unthinkable. It was hard to imagine how the country was going to be able to pull itself back together.
From the corner of my eye, I saw in the distance. Something moving at the side of the road which brought me out of my reverie. We moved closer, and I could make out a group of people. It looked like a family. A woman and two young children. They could have been no older than eight and ten. The mother was stood waving both hands as though to flag down oncoming traffic.