Chapter Thirteen
The sun dipped below the ridge of the Long Mynd as I strode back across the field to collect the car. Dusk leached out of the forest and spread over the fields. A sharp cry from high above alerted me to an arrow of geese, their beaks aimed south, and their wings thrumming the evening air. Their faces were rapt like pilgrims, leading the peloton to a better place. My mind filled with an image of another peloton. Boys flying along together, wheel spokes thrumming the air, the wind in their faces. Don’t look back, I thought. And then I shouted it as the geese powered overhead.
“Don’t look back!”
I ran a few steps after them, my legs heavy on the land and the backpack clattering against my spine, but their pumping wings soon became silhouettes, and then dots, and then clear air. They never looked back.
At the camp, I slid down from the Beast and squinted through the darkness to make out Peter and Charlie’s booby trap. At just the right height, the sunset glow caught the thin wire, and I was able to step cleanly over it. I smiled at their ingenuity.
As I came up the steep slope, I heard Joni’s low drawl, taming the kids with a story. One of their favorites, Where the Wild Things Are. Billy was sitting between her outspread legs beside a plump campfire. The light flickered across his face, warming the soft skin behind his ear. Maggie was chewing a marshmallow off a stick, which she then passed to the Lost Boy, who sat close beside her. Peter and Charlie silently role-played staring into one another’s monstrous eyes.
“It’s rumpus time!” announced Joni.
She leapt up, and all the kids joined her as they circled the campfire, performing war cries and tribal chants and ululating songs. “Hookah-lakah, hookah-lakah. Wokah-wokah-wokah-wokah. Ah-yee!”
“And sit down!” Joni’s deep whisper cut through the ruckus, and they scurried back to their places. Somehow, they knew exactly what to do. Sure-footed on her bedrock. She folded herself down in the middle of their circle and picked up the story. I walked into the camp just as the lost child got home.
Billy saw me first, and the spell was broken.
“Mum-may!” He clamped on to my knees.
“It’s past our bedtime!” said Maggie.
“Quick, get to bed!” said Charlie.
They scattered like mice, leaving just Joni. “Lola?”
I brought home disruption and disappointment. Quicksand. As soon as I told Joni about the Hoar Wood, she snatched up her car keys and faded into the night.
I carried Billy to his sleeping bag and stroked his soft spot with a curling finger as though I was stealing icing from a cake, like I might actually be able to eat him all up. I thought of the times I’d chased him around the house, threatening to bite his bum. The times I pretended to chow down on his soft tummy. Put him between two slices of buttered bread and have him for my tea. How his joyous laughter—she loves me so much—was tinged with a juicy tang of fear—she’s wild with love. I thought about the story Joni had just told, of a fierce love, the kind that devours.
Billy turned his head and slept. I went to settle Maggie, who was top to tail with the Lost Boy. Her hair was knotted around a sticky burr, and I untangled it, pulling it out strand by strand until it was free. By the time I’d finished, she, too, was asleep. The Lost Boy stared off into the darkness, and I patted his knee under the cover and let him be. Peter and Charlie took longer, as they needed to hear all about the man and his aloney steps and the strange house. “No, he didn’t say why he lived alone in the forest.” “No, he isn’t an outlaw.” “No, he doesn’t want to hurt us, at least I don’t think so.” “Why not? Gut feeling.” “Yes, I know I sound like Joni.” I stood up to leave: “But you boys must never go there by yourself, understood?”
“Understood.”
Afterward, I sat by the fire and rubbed my index finger across the underside of my wrist. It was the closest I could get to Billy’s silken ear. I rubbed it and settled down to wait for Joni to come back from the Hoar Wood. Later, a rumble of tires woke me, and I sprang to my feet in time to hear one set of footsteps climbing the granite path. I went to the food tent and brought Joni a bowl of her own hot soup.
I was desperate for sleep, weepingly tired, but my legs twitched me awake again and again. Random spots on my body pricked with itches that I slapped at like mosquitoes. Every time I rolled over, the air mattress made a noise like I felt. In the end, I grabbed a blanket and left the yurt before I woke everyone up. I looked over to my own tent, but the silence left behind by the dead boy echoed in the negative space. So much for the trail of ashes. His ghost rode my wake. I walked the opposite way, past the latrine and through the trees to where his grave lay, a black mound on the flat landscape of the field.
I stepped out from under the tree canopy like quarry, checking around with twitchy-rabbit glances. The light from the stars messed up my perception, so that I stumbled over the grave, surprised by its real contours when they rose from the depthless backdrop.
“Sorry,” I whispered. I hunkered down next to the freshly turned soil. The clods of mud were claggy in my fingers. Nothing could grow in this suffocating earth. It was no place for a young boy. “I’ll stay with you,” I whispered. “The first night is always the hardest.” I unrolled my blanket next to the grave and lay down. There were so many stars, it seemed their combined weight had pushed the sky lower. I reached up a hand to the Milky Way, which arched across the sky like an exploding rainbow, thinking I might actually touch it. And that was how I lay for a long time, one hand on the grave and the other on the sky.
Then there were footsteps in the grass.
“Are you sleeping out here?” Joni was incredulous. She stood over me for a moment, looked up, then sat cross-legged at my feet. She released a husky moan, like someone’s last breath after a long fight.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral,” I said. “Couldn’t face it.”
“It was awful. The kids got ornery, so I sent them away. By the end, it was just me and Peter.”
More deadened footsteps, and Horatio arrived. He sniffed at the grass with some disdain, turned a couple of circles, and managed to squeeze most of his bulk onto my legs. His body swelled and deflated as he let out an enormous put-upon sigh, and then we were still again.
“Do the stars make you feel safe?” Joni said. “Like nothing bad could happen under their watch?”
“More like detached. If someone came up and throttled me now—it doesn’t matter, does it, in the scheme of things?”
“That’s horseshit. It’s never mattered more.” Joni’s voice was tight. “You know how people say they would die for their kids? I never got that. What good are we dead? What’s hard is living for your kids. We only matter because we matter to them. It’s doubly true now.”
We both fell silent until Joni spotted a satellite. We watched it like two shipwrecked sailors on the shore, catching sight of a boat on the horizon. I had an urge to wave my arms and shout. But the satellite wasn’t even life. Just another relic moving through space on autopilot. Like us.
“It’s hard to imagine there are people out there,” said Joni.
“So many stars. There must be life on other planets.”
“Not aliens. I mean here. On Earth. It’s hard to imagine there are people out there—and the fuckers have quarantined us on this shitty island. Are they just carrying on? Eating and drinking and going to the movies, while we’re fricking dying? Who’s in charge anyway? Like Europe? NATO?”
“Wish I knew. We need to get a shortwave radio somehow.” I shoved Horatio aside so I could sit up, and he trudged back to the comfort of the camp. “Maybe it’s bedlam out there, who knows? Even if we’ve got the worst of it, like the hermit said—if we’re at the epicenter, in the eye of the storm or whatever—it must have spread to other countries to a degree. Maybe there’s proper apocalypse stuff going on—looting, fighting, killing each other for a loaf of bread.”
“But David is out there somewhere.” Her throat was thick. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
“Wednesday.” I looked at my watch. “Almost Thursday.” In the past few days, I’d not thought much about David or the fact that Joni had had no news of him. Any grief I had for Julian was so tied up in a rat’s nest of him leaving me and the plague and his affair that it was too tangled to unravel. I had simply laid it aside to pick at later. I was good at prioritizing.
“Or maybe they’re fine,” I said. “Maybe they’re still going to work, to school, to the movies. And we’re just another slot on the evening news.”
Joni cried for a long time without a word of explanation or apology. I kind of envied her that.
While Joni cried, I thought about my mother. Deep in my pocket, I still carried her jade brooch. The stars led me back to a safari when I’d been about Charlie’s age. One night, the nurse woke me and took me outside to see the sky. The air was filled with stars and also laughter from the bar: an equal source of wonder. But my mother spotted us and escorted me to bed. She stalked away through the savannah to the party without spilling a drop from her champagne flute. I’d cried because her dress was getting snagged in the red grass. Why did she never look after her beautiful things?
I told Joni the story once she calmed down.
“Did you love your mother?” she asked.
“She was perfect,” I said. “Of course I loved her.”
High clouds unfurled a veil across the stars, as though our time were up. The jade brooch dug into my hip when I got to my feet.
“I think we should leave,” I said, as we headed to the camp to get warm.
“We need to find Lola first.”
“Of course, no question. The Hoar Wood surrounds the hill fort: it’s not that big. We’ll go back again tomorrow. Keep looking until we find her. Then get out of here.”
“I drove all around it earlier. Ran up to the summit, even. Shit.” Joni stopped to unhook her trousers where they’d snagged on a thorn bush. She fiddled and swore in the dark.
“They could be holding her inside the wood—” I said.
“Holding her? Is that what the hermit guy said?”
“No, I told you, he just said he’d seen her at a boys’ camp. But why would she stay away?”
“She’s pissed at us. Both of us. Fricking thing, get off me!” Joni pulled her trousers from the thorns, and there was an inauspicious rip.
“You all right?” I could see only her hunched shape in the darkness.
“Awesome. My kid’s missing and my ass is hanging out.”
The Lady Lola had never struck me as a rebel. A bit enigmatic, perhaps—the Mona Lisa in Doc Martens—but she was no hothead, not the type to sniff glue or come home pregnant. Or run away and scare the bejesus out of her mother. And she had been so intent on finding Billy, her cousin. But I also had no idea if teenage girls’ tantrums lasted for two hours or two weeks. And, of course, it was comforting for Joni to hold on to the idea that she had chosen to stay away.
“I’m going out again now,” Joni said. “She must be somewhere. Maybe I missed some roads—”
“Why don’t we go in the morning,” I said. “All together?”
“I have to go now.”
I recognized the compulsion in her voice. It was pointless to fight it.
“Fine,” I said. “And then what?”
“I want to get as far away from here as possible.”
For once, we were on the same wavelength.
The kids were hiding inside a tree, a hollow oak with a bed of soft leaves. They wanted it to be our new home, even though they all had to stand up to fit inside. We let them play to give us a moment to consult the scribbled-up map.
“Here’s the wood. I went all around here last night.” Joni traced a large green patch, crisscrossed by blue waterways and surrounded by gray square symbols. “They must be someplace else.”
“We’ll widen the search area,” I said in a tone that would steady a horse. I started marking each gray square building with a number in a route that brought us in a large circle back to where we stood now, at the foot of the Bury Ditches.
Buried witches.
“We can get round these wooded areas and all the buildings in a day,” I said. But it had already cost us half the morning getting the small people mobilized. And then we had wasted time at Moton Hall, checking out the icehouse that the hermit had mentioned in such loving detail. We found nothing but buzz. Now we were finally at the Hoar Wood; it would make most sense to split up, but Joni had been out all night. The last thing we needed was another crash.
“Maybe we should ask the hermit guy to show us exactly where he saw her?” Joni was looking over the wooded knoll that rose 365 meters, the map told me, like a man’s hairy beer gut. The search area did seem big. I was trying to formulate an answer when the kids all rushed out of the tree and started shouting.
Mummy! Mrs. Greene! Mummy!
“What now—”
“Can’t you hear it?” Charlie shouted. They all shouted. I looked at Joni. She shrugged. The kids turned round and round, looking up into the sky, their mouths moving, like they were dancing to some celestial music.
“What is it?” I said.
“Wait!” said Joni, holding up a hand. “I can hear it.”
“What?”
“Chunka-chunka,” said Charlie, shouting right into my face, his mouth wide with joy. “Chunka-chunka!”
And then I could hear it too. The thudding of a helicopter. I closed my eyes until the sound stepped out from the crowd of wind and leaf noise. Its rhythm throbbed steadier than my heartbeat. The volume swelled, and then a machine burst over the wooded knoll in a blizzard of leaves and noise. We instinctively cowered. Billy sprang into my arms, and the others clung to my thighs as though they might be swept away by the tide. The helicopter powered over our heads and then turned in a steep circle, dipping toward us like a giant turning its gaze on an ant.
“What kind is it?” yelled Joni.
“A big one,” I shouted back. It wasn’t a police chopper, and it wasn’t military green. “It’s like one of those sea-rescue things.”
“Rescue! We’re rescued!” Peter and Charlie leapt up and down, screaming for the machine’s attention. Billy buried his face in my chest, and I put my hands over his ears. As the kids streamed away across the field, the helicopter completed its loop, dipped its nose, and thwacked off toward the hills. We watched it leave us. Somewhere over the Long Mynd it turned into just another pixel that made up the sky.
The trouble with the Wikipedia generation is that they cannot tolerate ignorance.
“I know fuck all about helicopters,” I pointed out for the umpteenth time. “I don’t know what type it was. I don’t know who was flying it. I don’t know what it was doing. I just don’t know.” With one hand on the steering wheel, I punctuated that final statement with jabs in the air.
Joni shushed me under her breath. I sucked in a lot of air and braked hard, because I had nearly missed the turn into a farm driveway.
“What fuck-all color was it?” asked Billy.
I pulled up outside a house with a wide stackyard, strewn with vehicles, and several long outhouses. I switched off the engine, and it tutted in the silence.
“Stay in the car.”
“But, Mum!” Charlie said. “You said Peter and I could help.”
“Charlie . . .”
“Please!”
The kids would fight if I left them alone in the car.
“All right, but you little ones stay here.”
Maggie set up howling.
“Maggie?” I laid a hand on her knee, and she stopped. “Can you please be in charge of Billy and the Lost Boy? It’s important that they stay in the car.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I think you should lock the doors, Mummy,” she said, “and leave my window open a bit so I can shout if they try to escape.”
“Good idea,” I said.
Joni headed off to circle the house. Charlie, Peter, and I turned the other way toward the barns.
“If you hear a kind of buzzing, back away, do you hear? There could be bodies.”
“We don’t look, we definitely don’t touch,” Charlie parroted the rules back to me.
“Right. And no climbing, Peter.”
“Yes, Mrs. Greene.”
“Just look for signs of life: empty drink cans or rubbish or sleeping bags. A quick look and we move on, okay?”
“Okay.”
We stopped beside the towering doors of a shed. It reeked of diesel fumes that must have built up over the past few days, so I pulled aside the doors to let it air for a moment. Beside the shed was a low concrete building. It looked as though some kind of animal stalls, an old dairy perhaps, had been converted into a squat row of lockup-style garages.
“Just check down there,” I told the boys before the lure of tractors and combine harvesters could tempt their immature lungs into the noxious shed. They trotted off toward the garages, and I held my sleeve over my nose and mouth and entered. The fumes made my head woozy, but the shed was otherwise immaculate. The concrete floor squeaked under my rubber boots. The blades of a plough glinted like razors in the light. I heard Charlie calling me from outside, and I scanned quickly under the vehicles, but there was no sign of a hideout. I slid the doors closed behind me.
Charlie ran out from the garages. “Mummy, see this.” He held an empty canister. It was white with a nozzle hanging from a piece of dirty string, its spout stained yellow. Charlie wrinkled his nose against the smell. From inside the garages, I heard the fingernails-down-a-blackboard friction of metal on metal as one of the shutters rolled up. Peter’s footsteps stumbled about inside. I took the petrol can from Charlie’s hand.
“There are loads more, Mummy.” He wiped at his eyes, which were pink and weeping from the pent-up vapors. “And gas bottles, like Daddy uses for the barbecue. Come and see.”
He turned back toward the outbuilding. My hand missed his collar and grasped air as Charlie sprang into his stride away from me.
No!
I didn’t know if I said the word or only thought it.
The shriek of another shutter grating through its metal slats was followed by a muted wallop. A single flash of light issued from the garages and evaporated into the daylight outside. My feet slid out from under me, and I was falling as an ice-blue flare roared from the low entrance. Then orange fire mushroomed out and broke apart to dance in eddies up to the sky.
As I scrambled up, reaching for Charlie, whose mouth was already shouting, I dragged him backward across the gravel by his shirt, cannon booms echoing inside my ears, and saw his lips press together and apart as he yelled, “Pe-ter!”
I crashed onto my backside and pressed my hands over my face. Through my filthy fingers I watched a broiling torch dart from the low entrance and run, shrieking, straight toward us.