Out of Time (14 page)

‘Sounds bloody.’

‘It is, though they’re usually satisfied with one death for each raid, two at the most. Then they leave.’

‘Why?’

‘Hard to tell.’

But Randolph knew.

There was a limit to what could be done on the farm. It remained only to feed, bed and water the animals twice a day. Neither goats nor cows yielded well and the hens ceased laying altogether. After a time, animal feed ran low and had to be rationed to a daily minimum. Inside, the community was increasingly reliant on its stores.

But the winter provided an unexpected benefit for Kathryn and Joe. Freed from the constant demands of work outside, they revelled in each extra minute spent together. Both knew that what the gods have granted they can take away.

*

The sewers underlie the town in a complicated network, culminating in four different sumps in which, filtered by gates, solid detritus remains. This the children have to empty into wheelbarrows and push up a tunnel. The gradient is steep. At the far end a grill is opened and other, older prisoners take over and wheel the sludge away. It is terrible work. The citizens living their lives above, deposit not only human waste but all decomposing matter. It piles up in great heaps. As soon as they have cleared a sump, it fills almost instantaneously. At least the waste gives off a modicum of warmth but the stench is unendurable. Some get accustomed to it, others die after a few days.

Susie suffers it as best she can. She is greatly sustained by her friendship with Ian and by her indomitable spirit. They are both determined to survive.

*

For all their love and passion Joe was acutely aware of a barrier between himself and Kathryn, inevitable he supposed, with so little of a past to share. He wanted to draw her in, to tell her about his life as it had been up to that moment, his previous hopes, ambitions, fears. He had no desire to return, he repeatedly assured her, but he wanted her to understand the world that had shaped him. He would begin by telling her about school, his mother, his father’s desertion, the kind of life he used to lead. Though she listened with attention he could sense resistance. Puzzled at first and hurt he gradually realised that it was not for lack of interest in what he had to say, but fear - fear that he regretted being with her and would try to return to his world. So he desisted and spoke only of the present.

I wish I didn’t know what he’s keeping back - his longing for his former life, I see the regret in his eyes when he talks about it. Sometimes, when he’s morose and silent, he’s off and away on another planet where I can’t reach him.

I have my own secret, don’t I; I prevaricate when he asks me about my past. I can only tell him so much, piecemeal bits of information so that he doesn’t guess the rest. This is not the way to conduct a loving relationship and I hate myself for my cowardice. It’s fear of losing him that is holding me back. I know already that Joe is my destiny, the most passionate love of my life, yet we neither of us can offer the other the confidences natural to lovers, we circle round the dangerous areas, ignore the pools of silence. My fear is that we’ll drown in them in the end. Somehow, sometime, I will have to take the risk. I will have to break the deadlock. But not yet, not yet.

JOE’S expectations of a loving relationship were, like Kathryn’s, high, his desire to share, to confide, to be honest about who he was and who he aspired to be, part of a romantic ideal that he had acquired, perhaps from television and films, perhaps from books; certainly not from his parents who, before they separated, lived in an atmosphere of barely suppressed aggression and of intense disappointment. This was a situation Joe did not want repeated. He wanted to hold nothing back from Kathryn and Kathryn to hold nothing back from him. Yet he had already been forced into a position in which he was reluctant to talk about his past. So was Kathryn. He could not imagine why. That their lack of openness would affect their intense love was his greatest fear. Their bodies were totally committed to one another, but their minds remained closed.

This studied non-communication extended to the others. Joe suspected them of conspiring with Kathryn to keep him ignorant of the reasons for their precarious situation. They in turn took Joe’s compliance for granted. He sensed also that they kept from him other, deeper truths.

His attempts at questions wavered from straightforward to subtle. These were met with skilfully balanced and firmly ambivalent replies. His only remaining option was to force the issue and break the silence but he was reluctant to implicate Kathryn, fearing the harm it might do to their relationship. He did not want to challenge her.

Opportunity presented itself one night when Belinda was on watch duty and everyone else in the kitchen holding a council of war about the possibility of an attack. Joe was unable to contain himself any longer and broke into the discussion with a demand that they be more specific about the reasons for the guerilla war being threatened.

‘Do they attack every winter?’ he asked

‘No, only sometimes.’

‘It’s time you let me in. I want to know what’s going on. I belong here now.’

They were silent at first, each one waiting for the other to speak. Otto, as always, took the lead.

‘Not ultimately. You can’t banish your roots and nor can we.’

‘It’s what you feel that matters, not what you are,’ Joe said.

‘It matters in the long run,’ Randolph said.

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I wish we didn’t.’

There was a sadness in Otto’s voice that silenced Joe.

Later Randolph took Kathryn aside.

‘We won’t be able to hold back much longer. He’ll have to be told.’

‘Be patient,’ she later begged Joe, ‘there are things about us you don’t yet know. We’ll tell you. Just give us a little more time.’

Time for what? he wondered. But he respected her wish and said no more.

The sun ceased to shine. The air, grey, frozen and still, concealed the world like a shroud. Sheep had to be dug out of snowdrifts and brought in, water carried daily from the well, for the stream had frozen, and precious hay and straw, normally rationed, provided in greater quantity. It was too cold to milk the cows in the mornings so they confined milking to midday until eventually the yield dropped to nothing. A continuation of the cold would force slaughtering them. This Joe dreaded, knowing it would be hard for Kathryn to bear.

Watch duty was confined to three hours at a stretch. Climbing up the frozen slippery trunk of the pine required thick boots and sheepskin clothing, making the ascent ever more hazardous. Otto offered to take his turn.

‘No,’ Randolph said, ‘we need you in the house, you know that.’

Otto acquiesced. He provided constant hot food and heated bricks inside hay sacks for the watchers to take.

‘It’s for your hands and feet. If you’re too cold you won’t be able to climb down.’

The oxen were brought in. Wild deer grew tame and in desperation for food tried poaching hay. Birds died, petrified with the cold. Joe watched a wood pigeon slide off an ice laden roof and land with a thud at his feet. Its glazed eyes were open and stared at him helplessly. It was already stiff. In the night, the howl of wolves circling the animals kept them awake. The pack was hungry and dangerous, bold enough to appear during the day uncomfortably close to the house. Sheds had to be made wolf-proof. One night Joe dreamed that their faces were pressed against his window, seeking entry.

He remembered with a shiver his previous encounter in the woods. His cries woke Kathryn.

‘What is it?’

He had scrupulously heeded her request to let matters lie and this, he had concluded, meant respecting also her reluctance to be drawn into his story; but now he forced her to listen as he traced his gradual metamorphosis from innocent boy to young man. He wanted her to understand the terror the wolves had inspired, not from their physical threat but through dark Stygian forces lying in his unconscious.

*

It is cold in the dungeon and the temperature is still dropping fast. Susie does not know how much longer she is going to last. The children are severely undernourished and several have died and been dragged away without ceremony.

Although talk is not allowed and any child caught speaking is punished by being deprived of their meagre ration of water and gruel, Ian and Susie talk at night. There is no guard on duty because none is prepared to spend even an hour in the dungeon. These precious hours are their salvation. Though they are half-dead with fatigue they tell each other everything; and they plot to escape despite the slim chances of success. The only visible way out is through the grill to which the wheelbarrows are taken but this is heavily guarded and the children are hit by batons if there is any misdemeanour, imagined or real. The guards are not frightened to batter the children to death. They are destined to die because they are illegal. Children are not supposed to exist.

Susie asks if anyone has seen a girl called Rose but no one has.

*

A blizzard hit some ten days after the first snow. To keep watch was impossible, the likelihood of the townspeople appearing remote. The wind roared through the trees, it beat great flurries of snow into the air and built up deep drifts. It howled round the buildings, sought every cranny, an evil spirit trying to gain entry. The house creaked and groaned in the onslaught and at the far end, as walls crumbled, wind and snow blasted their way inside. A section of the roof caved in. They repaired the damage as best they could but as often as not new reparations had to be made the next morning. It was war, the humans against the elements.

The animals, dispirited, retreated into a state of semi-hibernation, huddling together to keep warm. Feeding them once a day, buffeted by wind and snow, became a hazardous expedition. The goats and poultry were brought into a section of the house. The goats’ yields rose a little in the warmer atmosphere and kept the community supplied with small quantities milk but the chickens, heads lowered, feathers ruffled, refused to lay.

The humans spent their spare time in the kitchen next to a blazing fire generously fed by the logs they had sawn and saved. While Randolph shut out the wind’s howls with haunting melodies on the flute they busied themselves with a variety of odd jobs. Sometimes Kathryn sang.

One evening Joe had found in the carving shed a variety of soft woods piled in a corner. He had learned enough by then to recognise them as among the varieties used to make musical instruments. He had himself, when his mother was too hard up to buy him one, set out to make a guitar and had littered the garden shed with pieces of wood picked up from skips and waste grounds. He and Martin had studied the relevant manuals but after a first burst of enthusiasm were forced to give up. It was too difficult. His grandparents, in one of their few generous gestures, had eventually bought him one.

Now, as he listened to Randolph, he longed to play again. He missed his music.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘it would be possible to make a guitar.’

They looked puzzled. He explained.

Randolph sprang up and moments later came back with a six stringed, violin shaped instrument, similar to a viola. Its top was made from spruce, the body from rosewood. Though it had a patina to protect it, it was not highly polished like those at home but when Joe held it against his chest and strummed it gently he coaxed from it a mellow, dark sound that pleased him. The strings were made from gut. These were difficult to tune but he managed after a time to bring the instrument close to a D major scale. It had clearly not been played for some time.

He tentatively played the songs he knew best, singing along and gaining confidence as he familiarised himself with the instrument. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Van Morrison, any song he could remember even if only in phrases, poured from his fingers. To Joe’s astonishment Randolph quickly joined in, picking up refrains as he went along. With a purely oral tradition behind him, Randolph was adept at doing this. It made Joe wonder whether at home they had, despite all their carefully acquired literacy and notations, lost a true feeling for making music.

After several evenings of playing together they were able to regale their entranced listeners with songs by Aretha Franklin, Sting, Dido, Bob Dylan, the soul music of James Brown. It was a bizarre development, popular music from Joe’s times transferred to this empty wilderness for people who had never heard an electronic instrument, never mind CD’s or tapes, and who had certainly never been to a gig. But, once accustomed to the new sound, they revelled in it and would sing along with words to which they could not always relate but which they liked.

Some nights they told stories. These were extraordinary, unlike any Joe had ever heard, tales that travelled into realms undreamed of and unknown. One person would begin, someone else take up the tale then another and another in a round robin that could last all night. Joe was spellbound, drowned in a collective unconscious that reached into time immemorial.

At the onset of the cold weather Joe and Randolph had transferred the contents of the carving shed into a spare room in the house. Sometimes Joe brought his work into the kitchen and as he listened the enchantment of the words manifested itself in the creatures that crawled out of the wood. What nature killed outside he re-created. His first, an otter, long, lithe and delicate, crouched in the grass he gave to Belinda who had been coveting it with her eyes. Next came a fox for Randolph, bushy tail trailing as he had seen it on the night watches across the frozen fields. Otto, picking it up, said,