Anarchy (19 page)

Then she remembered the man and dog and their car, stuck now in the middle of it, snipping the string.

The problem of what she was going to do became immediate. What was she going to do
now
?

Now,
like
her
e
,
had nothing to it; it was empty; it was like reaching for the banister in the dark and finding nothing. She felt her breath coming faster. The rain intensified. Its noise in the branches mocked her with phantom familiarity:
I am a thing you think you know
.

After a while she decided she ought to try finding a sign that pointed to where Horace lived, or a person who knew where he was. Horace had always loved to tell her things about the world, before he'd stopped coming to see her (without even a good-bye). Though she wondered now whether all of it had been lies, like the other things people had lied to her about, her father and Gwen telling her they'd always love her and look after her, Gawain promising he'd stay with her always. Gwen had always told her the world was full of people, so many that the number of them was actually impossible to think about. Where were they? She thought there were supposed to be cars in the roads and dwellers in the houses. She'd read about them. Owen had talked about everyone else having to abandon where they lived because of the snow and not having any food or warmth, but most of the snow was gone now. There must be someone who knew where she was supposed to go next.

She went back onto the wider road and walked along it again until she reached the less tiny of the overlooking houses. She watched it for a while, looking for firelight in the windows, or smoke from the chimney, but it was as quiet as a dollhouse. She went closer, step by slow step. The strangeness of it, the differentness, seeped out of its stones. They were yellow-brown like stream pebbles, the wrong color for a house. The wood of the window frames was rotten and the windows themselves were sheets of flat darkness. She made herself walk in front of them. Beyond the house a gate opened off the road into a sort of courtyard, like the stable yard but smaller and with the stables open-sided and haphazard. The side windows of the house were cracked with patterns like spiderwebs. Filthy greying snow filled the edges and corners of the yard. In the middle of it was a pile of charred things like an oversized half-finished campfire. The charring spread out from it too, burned scraps and fragments stuck in the snow or glued by damp to the buildings or snagged in the hedge by the gate. One of them caught her eye: a shred of paper with a picture on it, blackened and sodden and caught in the twigs but not yet completely erased. She noticed it because she saw a glimpse of a crumpled face. It pricked her eye with a minuscule jab of recognition. She bent down and poked at the scrap where it was buried in the hedge. Part of it disintegrated limply at her touch, but she was able to straighten it enough to see the face fully. In that ocean of difference she identified it immediately as the remains of a thing she'd seen before. Gwen showed it to her sometimes: the rectangle of blue-green colored paper with swirly patterns and portentous words and a big number five and the head of the old woman who was supposed to be a kind of pretend queen although she didn't look even slightly queenly, despite the crown.

Marina didn't like to think of when Gwen might have come this way, or why someone might have set fire to her piece of paper with all the other things. She didn't like to think about what had happened to Gwen at all. Even starting to remember it hurt her, a very particular kind of pain, an involuntary twist and wrench as if the bad memory was a small beast that had taken up residence in her guts and attacked her unless she pretended it wasn't there. She walked faster, leaving the empty house behind. The rain drummed an insistent rhythm. Her wet feet were beginning to rub.

• • •

Descending steadily, the new road went under taller trees. The familiar smell of wet oaks and alders swamped her so intensely that she wondered whether her path had turned her around and was about to deliver her back to the Pendurra woods. She pulled the hood of her coat forward to keep the rain out of her eyes and trudged on, glad to be going downhill, until an abrupt whoosh of heavy wingbeats made her look over her shoulder. A pair of swans came flying over the brow of the hill behind her and wheeled down behind the trees ahead.

Only then did she realize she'd been led to the bank of the river.

The road kinked around a steep corner and went right down to a creek mouth, a wood-fringed pocket of flat water opening out onto the tidal expanse beyond. She knew it was the river, the same one, even though it was far narrower than she'd ever seen it before and the shape of the land on the far bank was all wrong too. The differences melted away in face of its serene certainty. The water she was looking at through a screen of trees was flowing slowly seaward and would pass under the lookout where she'd sat a hundred thousand times, and then around the headland where she'd been on a hundred thousand walks and picnics. It was as familiar as a face.

She stopped and looked away, balling her fists in the pockets of her father's coat.

For three months she'd refused to sit at the lookout or walk to the head or go anywhere in sight of the river.

Her heart was beating hot. She looked behind her, back up the steep hill. Apart from the rain and the thudding in her ears, everything was calm.

She remembered how the other road had always gone down and then up, dropping to the swollen streams and then climbing away from them. She told herself it would be all right, this one would be the same. She made herself look across the ribbon of water. Nothing stirred. The upended bows of two or three sunken boats stuck up out of the water, but otherwise nothing disturbed it but the pecking of the rain. She put her head down and carried on.

She followed the road to the edge of the creek. It turned sharply there to cross the inlet before rising away from the bank. There had been a bridge at the crossing, a stone hump barely wide enough for a single car. She saw the arc of stone lying cracked and sideways in the water. The road tipped up into empty space. The bridge had washed away.

She walked right up to the crumbled lip. The creek seethed below her, milky brown with the earth it dragged away for drowning. It had come far up over its banks; she could tell that by the trees that must once have overlooked it but now stood feet from dry land. The broken edge of the bridge on the other side might as well have been the far bank of the river itself, for all the chance she had of crossing. The road had led her nowhere: a dead end.

The rain gained a voice.

“Marina!”

She whirled around. Out in the river a white shape was gathering, a shape that made her heart stall. A white body came gliding up out of the water, cresting it like a swan.

“Daughter!”

It rose like a wave, effortless and fast. It seemed to be made of the marriage of rain and river. It held out its arms. The beast woke again in Marina's stomach, seized something tender, and bit. She doubled over, dropping to her knees.

“Child, my child! Marina!”

She shut her eyes tight. She heard the voice coming closer but couldn't look, or wouldn't.

“Dear heart.” The voice was so like the rain, full and hollow at the same time. “What possessed you to try your luck in this world of men and women? Come to me now. Come, be safe.”

She bit her lip to stop herself moaning aloud at the suddenly ferocious pain.

“Marina? Won't you even look at me? Can you still not forgive me?” The voice was close below now. It had turned soft. “But here you are. You've come at last, beloved. Thank you. Look at me now. I want you to see my promise. I'll do nothing to hurt you again. I'll keep you with me always. Child, poor child, was there no one to tell you you can't live in the wasteland? Take my hand, Marina. Come. Open your eyes.”

Marina opened her eyes.

Her mother was standing at the edge of the flooded creek, white and green like another half-drowned willow. The rain smoothed over her as if there was no difference between its substance and hers. She seemed to be flowing down into the water where she stood, at rest yet in motion like the river itself. She held her arms out, white fingers taut. She was perhaps three of those arm's lengths away from where Marina crouched on the broken road.

“I waited for you every day.” Her words dribbled over Marina and puddled away. “I know how hard your sadness must be and I waited to comfort you as a mother should. Every day, dearest child. And not one day would you come to me. You've been cruel.” At the word
cruel
Marina twitched, plucking the soggy cuffs of her coat in her fists. “I was wild with fear for you. We wrecked every vessel that approached your shore. We drowned every man. It was all to keep you safe, dear heart.”

Marina could smell her now. It was an old, mysteriously familiar smell that had once made her happy, the particular tang of pebbles in running water. She and Gwen used to sit beside the stream, counting things and making paper boats.

“You're growing into my daughter. I can see it in you. Men can see it. They will love you, and not know why, and want to hurt you for it. Your time has come to leave them behind. Everything will be well in the water, dearest. No one will injure you again. You and I will love only each other, always.” Swan-graceful, swan-smooth, she slipped along the water. Only her ankles now made eddies in the flow. She held her arm up. “Come.”

“Don't touch me!”

Marina sprang to her feet. Her fists trembled beside her. She screamed again. “Get away from me!”

“Daughter—”

“How can you call me that?” Bending at the waist as if she might spit at her mother, she hammered her hands against her own thighs. “How can you even speak to me? How dare you?”

The wind gathered and began to moan.

“I don't want to be your daughter. I don't want to be anything like you!” Swanny stood frozen in the water like an alabaster offering. “How can you call me cruel? Me? Me?”

“Marina.” Agitated wavelets ruffled the river. Slanted by the sudden gust, the cold rain spattered into the girl's eyes. “Spare me.”

“You're nothing to me. I wish you were dead like everyone said. I wish Daddy had killed you! Shurrup! Go away!” Stumbling, she spun around. The road skirted the edge of the riverbank; she blundered away from it, heading into the trees. There was an overgrown track there, rising away from the mouth of the creek. It was little more than a trough of leaf-strewn black mud but it was earth, it was under cover. “Don't say anything!” She lunged toward the track, half blind with tears, her limping steps like furious punctuation. “I'll never come near the river again! You'll never see me again! Never, ever!” The gnawing misery down in her core twisted and writhed and wrenched as if it wanted to slay her through sheer despair. “Never! Never!” Behind her, in the river, an awful howl was rising. The abrupt wind bent and clattered the trees. “I want Gawain!” She couldn't stand up. She ran hunched as if about to drop on all fours. “Gawain!” Her feet sank in the mud but she drove herself on blindly, caring only that she was going away from the river, away from everything that lived in it, everything that had died in it. Weeks of pent-up grief burst out in a flood. “Gawain!” she cried, but even his name only fed the terrible memory, the one she was no longer strong enough to fend off. She saw it behind the veil of tears that had turned the world blurry: coming scampering back to the cove, steering the wooden box so carefully in her two hands, proud of herself for having spilled hardly any of the well water at all, and then looking up and down and up the shore again in the fading light, her father gone.

15

H
ours later, Marina dragged herself out of the darkening wood into a patch of open space sheltered by lines of cypress and yew. She was black with mud from shoes to thighs and all up her forearms. She'd fallen many times, and sat crying almost as many, hugging the jute bag to her chest, too broken to bother pushing herself farther along the forest path, until the tears ran out and there was nothing else to do. The track wound a long way through those woods, always ascending and always soft and heavy underfoot. By the time it came out at the bottom of what had once been a garden, she was so exhausted she could have dropped on the grass in the rain and gone to sleep with only the coat for covering. There was a gap in the wall of yews, though, with a set of stone steps leading up, and beyond them a low building with an overhanging shelter. She saw and heard rainwater spilling down from a broken gutter.

She limped up the steps into a ruined square of converted farm buildings. The bowl of the fountain in the middle of the square still held a well of snow. She stepped around broken glass and flowerpots and a stack of green plastic chairs tipped across once-neat rows of box and lavender. She could still smell the box, but the lavender was dead, twisted clumps the color of bone. Wires drooped from a tall pole at one corner. She put her mouth under the spout of rainwater and drank; then she took off her coat and shoes and socks and stood under it, scratching at herself until most of the mud was gone from her skin. The door to one two-story brown building across the square was open a crack. It was warped and jammed; she had to bang it with her palms to get the crack wide enough for her to slip in. The room beyond was a shadowy mess of things ransacked and upended and abandoned. She found a checkered tablecloth. It smelled of stale water and mold. She wrapped herself up in it, lay down on a patch of rug in a corner, and curled herself tight as a cat.

The rain eased. A fresh evening wind came up out of the southwest and swept the last of it away. Gaps opened in the clouds. While Marina slept, the descending sun found one of those gaps. For the last few minutes before dusk its light streamed slantwise across the freshly rinsed country like a volley of golden arrows. They poured in through a defenseless window and stung the sleeping girl in the face.

• • •

The first few times she woke up it was quiet as well as completely dark, the silence almost as perfect as the darkness. There was just the far-off sound of water running for her to listen to. She could almost have been asleep on the floor of her own bedroom, except the smells were wrong.

Then different noises happened. Scrunching and scraping, like Daddy and Caleb coming back inside late, their footsteps rough in the gravel below her bedroom window and their conversation too quiet to hear properly. She heard whispering as well as scrunching. Not Daddy and Caleb, because they were both gone and she didn't know where she was.

Glimmers of white light appeared in a window, too small and high up for her bedroom windows, and in the wrong place. For a second the square of dirty glass flared bright as the beam of the lighthouse across the bay.

There were people outside, with flashlights. She recognized the beams of light. Gwen used to walk back to her house with a flashlight in the winter evenings. Marina wasn't supposed to touch it.

The people mumbled to each other. One mumble sounded a bit like Caleb, but the other was completely different, and even the one that sounded like Caleb wasn't right. They were other people, people she didn't know about.

“You have a look in there,” muttered the slightly Caleb-like voice. Marina was completely awake now. The flashlight's beam fixed on the jammed door. A white sliver came through the crack, lighting up a crazy arrangement of objects and shadows. She felt her heart beating very fast.

“What about you?” The other voice was much thinner and higher.

The light swung away, leaving her in blackness again. “That was the shop, over that way. I'll have a look in there.”

“I'll come with you.”

“In a bit. You see what you can find in that one first. It looks like where they lived. Might have left stuff behind.” Back came the beam of light.

“By myself ?”

“I told you. I can't fit.”

“Let's break down the door, then.”

“Don't be stupid.”

“It's not stupid.”

“You want someone to hear us? In you go and have a quick look, go on.”

“You said there's no one here, Dad.”

“What's wrong? Scared?”

“I don't want to go on my own.”

“Could have thought of that before you said you wanted to come. It's too late now to mess around.”

The two of them scrunched closer, light from two flashlights wobbling all around the slender crack of the open door. Marina burrowed herself behind a toppled chair.

“Please, Dad.”

“What are you so bloody frightened of ? You can bloody well stay at home from now on if you're going to be like this. Get in.”

“Can you wait right outside?”

“No, I bloody well cannot wait right outside. Next time I'm letting your sister come. You're more a baby than she is.”

One of them banged against the door.

“Shhhh!”

“You said no one's here!”

“Could be anyone about, couldn't there? What did I say right at the start? You keep bloody quiet!” There was a scuffle, and an angry whimper. “Don't forget upstairs too. There were six or seven of them, must have had a few rooms. Check them all, right? Properly now. If you're out in less than five minutes you'll have some trouble.”

Marina held herself completely still. The room darkened again, because someone was squeezing through the door. She could hear breathing. Then, a moment later, the light was inside. It swept shakily around.

“There's nothing in here, Dad,” the thin voice called, so close it could have been on top of her. Its owner shuffled around on the far side of the tumbled chair. “It's all just junk.” A girl's voice, squeaky and nervous.

“Stop bloody shouting! Upstairs. Five minutes. Every room, all right?”

“All right.”

“See? Nothing to be scared of.”

“Stay there.”

“Come over when you're finished. I'll be looking in the shop. Five minutes. I'm counting.”

“Dad! Stay there!”

The outside steps scraped away.

“Dad!” said the close voice. “Dad!” The whisper hissed with fear.

“I hate you,” it went on, a bit later, now a shaky mumble. The light began to sway around the room again, poking into corners. “Hate you. Hate you.” The girl moved deeper into the room. She was still breathing too fast. “No one's here. I'm not going. Stupid . . . stupid . . .” She pushed at something, another chair maybe, making it grind against the floor. “Stupid junk. I hate . . .”

Marina sat unmoving, listening to the mumbling and the shuffling. The taint of strangeness so close to her almost made her choke. She felt she ought to say something, but how could she, when she had no idea at all who this other person was? The stranger went upstairs after another minute or two. There was some hesitant banging and scraping above, feet moving back and forth for a while, and then the almost familiar sound of creaking stairs again.

Marina stole a look from behind her chair. The staircase was down a short corridor on the far side of the room. She saw the light coming down it and, before the flashlight swung straight along the corridor and made her duck out of sight, glimpsed the person who held it: a girl smaller than herself, with anxious eyes and a half-open mouth.

The other girl had stopped whispering. She came back close to where Marina was and then squeezed herself out the jammed door.

Marina couldn't think of anything to say or do, and couldn't possibly have got herself back to sleep, so she sat in the darkness, feeling for her bag. By touch she itemized its contents: book, piece of hard bread, onion, shift, extra socks, cabbage leaf, extra skirt, half-chewed length of salsify. The shift was still damp. She felt around for a surface to hang it over. She couldn't find her shoes or sweater or coat, until she remembered taking them off before washing herself under the gutter outside. Would they still be there where she'd dropped them? That was how it worked in the places she knew. If you put something down in the hallway or the kitchen or under one of the garden trees, it would stay there until you picked it up again, unless Gwen or Daddy or Caleb tidied it away. She had no faith that it would be the same here. The world around her felt shapeless and loose, liquid not solid.

The voices with their flashlights came back. Even before they were close enough for her to distinguish words, Marina could tell their tone had changed, whispery excitement now instead of anger and fear.

“Here,” said the father's voice, when they stopped outside the jammed door.

“Won't that make a lot of noise?”

“Never mind that. Only way to break it. Make sure you don't hold back. Once or twice really hard and the lock'll snap just like that. Don't go tapping it like a girl now. Hold it like this. Then you give a proper whack with the hammer.” One flashlight swung up and down. “Proper whack. See?”

“What if it doesn't break?”

“Wedge this in, nice hard whack there, it'll break in one go. Easy.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Just give it a go. That's a girl. A proper go, now. Then you tell me what you find.”

“Is there going to be food?”

“Food? No. Not in a bloody filing cabinet. Least I bloody hope not. This lot were such bloody freaks, who knows what they did. Probably just papers and such.”

“Why can't we leave it, then?”

“ 'Cause it's locked. See? You don't lock something if it ain't valuable.”

“Can you sell papers on eBay?”

“We'll see, all right? Go on, then.”

“Wait here, Dad?”

“Right here. Hurry up. Proper whack, remember. Imagine you're hitting that teacher.”

The girl wriggled in through the crack again. This time she went straight upstairs. A few moments later, and there came a splintering metallic crack and a squeak of pain.

The father outside put his face to the opening and hissed, “Amber?”

“Did it in one, Dad,” Amber shouted from upstairs, too proud of herself to whisper.

“Good girl. What d'you find?”

“Paper. Oh. Dad!”

“What?”

“Dad, come up here!”

“I can't bloody come up there, I can't get through the bloody door.”

“There's a box!”

“What sort of box?”

The girl came jogging down the stairs, the beam from her flashlight bouncing. She hurried to the door. “Look,” she said. “It might be money.”

Something rattled.

“Give us the hammer and chisel,” the man said.

“I'll do it in here.”

“No, you won't. Give us. Now.”

The girl squeezed out again. There was another crack, a tinny rattle, then a silence.

“Just more papers,” the man said, his voice flat.

“They look old,” the girl said.

“Official stuff.”

“What's that?”

“For lawyers.”

“Whose lawyers?”

“Doesn't matter anymore,” the man said, and grunted a kind of laugh.

“Can we sell them on eeee-bay?”

“Will you shut up about bloody eBay? There's no more bloody eBay either. Here. What's this?”

“That's a Jesus.”

“We'll take that. Might be silver.”

“There's something else.”

Marina heard paper being pushed around. The people outside went quiet again for a few seconds.

“Acorn,” said the man.

“What's it made of ?”

“What's it made of ? It's made of bloody tree, it's a bloody acorn.”

“Can we sell it on— Can we sell it?”

“Course we can't, idiot. They grow, don't they.”

“Why'd they hide it in a box, then?”

“How the bloody hell do I know? They were all bloody nutters living here. Bloody Christians. Probably their holy acorn.”

“Should we take it?” Amber asked. “If it's holy?”

Her father took a while to reply. “What else d'you find?”

“Nothing.” She said it
nuffing,
like Horace did; Marina wondered for a moment whether these people might know where he'd gone, and whether she ought to go out and ask them. “Just books and stuff.”

“What sort of stuff ? I told you to have a proper look.”

“Just books.”

The man grunted. “Might do for burning. All right. The good stuff's up in the big house anyway. Let's have a look. Come on.”

“What about that acorn?”

“Rubbish.” His voice was farther away already. “You'd better learn what's rubbish and what isn't if you want to keep coming with me.”

“Dad! Wait!”

Then all she could hear was footsteps and mumbles, and then nothing except the steady clatter of the flooding stream. She worried for a while that she'd missed her chance to find out about Horace or the village where he lived, but when she tried to imagine feeling her way out from her dark corner and saying hello she couldn't do it. There was no background, nowhere to start. She'd hardly understood anything the girl and her father had said to each other. She knew all the words but they didn't add up, like a nonsense poem. Only the acorn stuck in her head. She curled herself up again, thinking of the word
acorn,
a small, hard, solid living thing. She remembered what an acorn felt like in her hand, and in her head too: the wonder of knowing what grandeur lay hidden in a thing small enough to fit under her tongue.

• • •

She didn't remember it becoming light so she supposed she must have slept. She felt achy and tired and hungry, not at all the way waking up usually felt. She tried reading for a bit like she normally did in the morning before going down for breakfast, but it didn't help. There was nowhere to go down to. There was no breakfast. She wasn't even wearing her pajamas.