Children of the Dust (5 page)

'In the village there might
be
electric,' said William.

'No, there won't. There's no electric anywhere.'

'How do you know?'

'Because I'm in the Junior School and you're only in the Infants,' Catherine said loftily.

'We could play at schools,' Sarah suggested. 'I could be the teacher and you could be in my class. What's four plus three, William?"

'You said we wouldn't have to go to school ever again!' William said furiously. 'And I don't want to play schools! I want to play cards like we did last night.'

But last night's party was over and they could not recapture a time that was gone. They could only sit in the blind black dark waiting for Veronica to come home. And Sarah would not risk burning another extra candle. She did not share William's optimism that all the goods they had ordered would be delivered. 'No!' said Sarah. 'How many more times?' And he flung the cards in her face.

Lunch time came and Veronica had not returned. Sarah worried about violence and lawlessness, gangs of looters in a world gone mad. And there was nothing for lunch except potatoes boiled in their skins and a lump of dried cheese which Sarah made into sauce. William refused to eat it. The bookcase shelves were full of tins, meatballs, ravioli, sardines and tuna fish, salmon and luncheon meat, which William wanted instead, and Sarah would not give him. 

'You can eat what's on your plate,' she told him. 

'Won't!' said William. 

'I'll eat it,' Catherine offered. 

Sarah gave her William's potato.

'That's mine!' William howled.

It was a long wearying time without Veronica, having to cope with William alone. Sarah could feel her strength and patience being drained away. And when Veronica finally returned she was not alone. Sarah recognized the gruff tones of Farmer Arkright. She could not begin to imagine why he was there but then, loud and deafening, just outside in the garden, came a single gunshot.

Buster died with a yelp, was buried in the cabbage patch . . . sounds of a shovel in dry earth. Human voices, woman and man, talked for a while and faded into silence. Catherine sobbed beneath the table. William went quiet and slow tears trickled down Sarah's face. Then the car boot slammed, and something rustled outside on the concrete like dry paper. She heard the garden shears snipping through polythene, listened as Veronica nailed it to the kitchen window frame and sealed it with insulation tape. Then the lid of the rain barrel rattled and she went to work with the squeezy mop.

'I wonder if she's brought my Mars bar?' William said. He banged on the closed door, trying to gain Veronica's attention. 'Have you got my Mars bar?' William shouted. Veronica ignored him, so he pushed against the door and broke the sticky tape seal. His bare feet paddled through dust and soap suds in the eerie half light. 'Have you got my Mars bar?' he repeated.

Veronica, when she turned to him, no longer looked like his mother. She looked more like a mad woman, old and haggard, with sunken eyes and matted unkempt hair. She had taken off her garbage bag suit and her clothes were creased from where she had slept in them, her voice demented.

'Get back inside!' Veronica screamed. 'And don't come out here again until I tell you! There weren't any Mars bars! I'm not a blasted magician!'

Sarah caught hold of William's arm and hauled him back into the room. He screamed and fought and struggled and hated. Then, in the depths of the armchair, he sat and cried ... a five-year-old child, inconsolable in his disappointment, his expectations finally crushed. Soon, Sarah knew, he would cry for a different reason. Not for the loss of a Mars bar, but for water and bread.

Veronica had not found much on her scavenging expedition. The shops had all been looted. But people at the church had given her two boxes of matches, a loaf of bread and three packets of soup. She had found several bars of diabetic chocolate and two dented tins of baby milk among the debris of the chemist's shop, and a few packets of crisps and peanuts in the storeroom behind the pub. But Catherine had her torch, plus spare batteries, two packets of candles and a cylinder of camping gas. Eggs and milk and meat had come from Harrowgate Farm, and a sack of low-grade potatoes for feeding livestock. The Spencers had gone from Brookside Cottage, Veronica said. She had searched the cupboards hoping to find food but someone had been there before her, and no one was bothering about staying indoors.

'There's nothing left,' Veronica said.

Dark light filtered through the polythene window and Sarah gazed at the measly supplies spread along the freshly washed counter top. It was not enough to last them very long, and they were bound to eat the contaminated food, the milk and meat, leeks and cabbage from the garden. Either from sickness or starvation they were certain to die. But William munched contentedly on a crust of bread and jam.

"What's in this box?' he asked.

'Nothing for us,' Veronica said.

Sarah opened it up. It was a gift for a world that would grow again, a world that she and William and Veronica would never see. Sarah stared at the packets of seeds . . . peas, beans, onions and turnips, carrots and swedes, every vegetable imaginable. There and then they could have grown the cress seeds on the metal tea tray in a bed of newspaper, but she carefully replaced them and closed the lid. This box was for Catherine, an inheritance for life in a world where money was useless, where gold had no value, where stocks and shares were just so much waste paper, and industry was gone.

The rest of the day was spent in the kitchen. There was just enough light to see by, a dreary perpetual twilight with the nuclear ash falling like snow over the outside land. Veronica never said how bad things really were, but Sarah could guess from her attitude, brooding and silent as she cooked the evening meal. It was a feast that would kill them . . . beefsteak, potatoes and cabbage, with chocolate blancmange for pudding. But it was easier to know and eat it, than cling to the deprivation needed to survive. All Catherine ate were two cocktail sausages and a quarter of a tin of baked beans. She ate it from a tray in her house below the table and would not come into the kitchen, not even to play cards.

Sarah peered through the gloom trying to distinguish hearts from diamonds, clubs from spades. There was no enjoyment, just a sense of duty, an obligation to keep William entertained. Growing cold and the evening darkness finally drove her inside and, all over again, after the comparative freshness of the kitchen, the stench of human excrement was foul in her nostrils. Candlelight flickered and the door closed her in, and the long hard hours stretched all the way back to the morning. It was nine o'clock, but still William was not tired. Sarah played more card games, fed him cocoa and dog biscuits, and read stories from the Bible. He was asleep in the armchair by the time she reached Noah but Catherine wanted her to read on.

'And God looked on the earth and saw it was wicked, that men had corrupted His ways with their evil and violence, and He decided to destroy them with the earth.'

'Is that what God's done now?' Catherine asked.

'He didn't make the bombs,' said Sarah.

'But he knew we were wicked," said Catherine.

Maybe she was right, Sarah thought. Reports of evil and violence had appeared every day in the newspapers and on the television, and God had done nothing to stop them destroying themselves.

'When I grow up,' Catherine said decisively, 'I'm not going to be wicked. And I'm not going to let anyone else be wicked either. Then God won't have to do this again, will he?'

'It wasn't God's fault,' Sarah said doubtfully.

'It wasn't ours either,' Veronica said.

'I suppose it was the Government,' said Sarah. 'But who elected them, Veronica? People like you and Daddy.'

'And now we suffer for it,' Veronica murmured.

'I'm not going to have a government when I grow up,' said Catherine. 'I'm going to live in the Garden of Eden, like Adam and Eve. Only there won't be any serpents because they've all died in the nuclear war.'

Catherine could still dream. But Sarah had to face the reality, words out of darkness, Veronica telling her what it was like outside before she slept. People were not even trying to survive, Veronica said. It was like one big party, terrible, tragic, everyone congregated together in the church, and the chapel, and the school. Some of them were sick already, and they were all half starved, yet they were willing to share what they had. Farmer Arkright, Joe Sefton at the bakery, the poultry farm on Winnow's Hill, were delivering everything they could to the centres. As the cows fell sick Farmer Arkright intended to shoot them and butcher the carcasses. It was kinder that way, Veronica said,
and she had asked him to shoot Buster out of kindness. 

'But you can't shoot people,' Veronica stated. 'Not even when you know they're going to die. We wouldn't allow animals to suffer such a terrible death, yet we expect it of people." She switched on the torch and went to the sideboard drawer, brought out a bottle of tablets and held them up to the light. 'Just so you know where they are when I'm gone,' Veronica said.

Sarah nodded, watched her replace them. However terrible living might become she could not imagine ever wanting to take them. In the beginning suicide had been her suggestion but now the roles were reversed. Veronica foresaw the time when death might be preferable.

'I think we should face it now,' Veronica said calmly. 'I don't want William to die, slowly and painfully, as Buster would have done. He was bleeding from inside, Sarah. There were sores around his eyes and his fur was falling out. And I've seen those people at the church. You have to promise me, Sarah. You have to promise to look after William when I'm gone.'

Her voice was pleading and torchlight reflected in the darkness of her eyes, and at the corner of her mouth was a small weeping sore. Something cold and terrible landed in Sarah's stomach. That sore was a symptom of radiation sickness and Veronica was already dying. That was why she thought of William and asked Sarah to promise. In the loneliness and silence Sarah reached for her hand, sweating and clammy and cold as ice. The precious person Veronica had become would soon be leaving her.

'I'll look after him, Veronica,' she said.

And a lump rose to her throat as Veronica smiled.

Life was a little easier with the kitchen to move about in, more air, more space, and the gloomy natural light that came through the polythene window. Or maybe they had simply grown accustomed to their situation and become resigned. On the blue linoleum floor William played quietly with his Tonka truck, built houses out of Lego bricks or playing cards. Sometimes he even played with Catherine - Barbie doll games in her house beneath the table. Most of the time she still insisted on staying there, practising her handwriting in Sarah's history exercise book by the light of her torch, reading about God and Noah and Adam and Eve, or sewing Barbie doll wedding dresses from the net curtains that had one hung at the kitchen windows. Catherine laughed and chattered like a normal little girl, but the rest of them had changed, as if something inside them were dying, their souls gone dull.

There was nothing to do, nothing to live for, or plan for, or talk about. They were gripped by an apathy from which they could not escape, without motivation, waiting to die, their body clockwork slowly winding down. They were not short of food. They had meat and vegetables enough for several days, and enough tins to keep Catherine alive. And when it was gone Veronica went to Harrowgate Farm for more.

One by one as the cows fell sick Farmer Arkright slaughtered them, shots heard at morning up on the hill. Daily in the Land Rover he delivered meat and milk to the village centres, and other farmers did the same. But the supplies were not limitless. Joe Sefton ran out of flour for making bread, and eggs got scarce at the poultry farm as more and more chickens died. Veronica said that starvation was no longer a worry, that human deaths were keeping pace with the deaths of animals. They burned the bodies in the churchyard, the smoke of cremations adding to the darkness of the sky.

Sarah had no illusions. What was happening to Veronica would happen to herself and William. The sores spread on her face. Her gums bled. Her teeth came loose. And her hair came out in handfuls. And when the church bells rang, peel after peel of joyful clamorous sound, telling them the fortnight was over, nothing changed. Their lives went on, day following day, with the dust still falling on the twilit land. No one advised them it was safe to go outside. There was nothing but crackle from the radio stations, and the days grew colder, and the sky at evening turned to the colour of blood.

Sarah scrubbed clean the leeks Veronica had unearthed from the garden. Pale dust floated on the surface of the water and William was plucking one of Farmer Arkright's chickens for a stew. He was not like the William they had always known. That little boy was gone. He had been outside and seen for himself... a world of dust, rats and flies and putrefying bodies of sheep, Brookside Cottage empty and abandoned, no one to play with and himself alone. He was quiet and repressed, doing what he was told without really caring, his blue eyes empty of life.

'If I could feel,' Veronica said, 'I think he would break my heart.'

Sarah knew what she meant. It was strange how they simply stopped feeling, as if something inside them switched off like a safety device. Nature was kind after all. They were spared all the fear and panic, hopelessness and horror, the inevitability of their deaths. They simply accepted it and quite dispassionately Sarah could watch the spasm of pain that blanched Veronica's ravaged face.

'Why don't you go and lie down?' she suggested.

But Veronica gripped her stomach.

And went outside.

It was maybe a month when the shooting stopped at Harrowgate Farm and Veronica toiled up the hill for the very last time. She was almost too sick to walk, yet she insisted, and returned an hour later with a dead maggoty chicken and a shopping bag full of tinned food. The Arkrights were dead, she said. She had found them lying on the living-room floor, Farmer Arkright and his wife, both shot in the head. She had covered them with a sheet and rifled the store cupboard . . . tinned corned beef, sardines and pilchards, two tins of cat food and a bag of flour. She had not been able to carry the bottled fruit, she said.