The Secret Bunker Trilogy: Part One: Darkness Falls

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Beyond the great, iron doors I hear the ghostly wail of sirens.
I’m familiar with this noise, from school, when watching old films
about World War Two and the London bombings. Only this is here and now, and I’m on holiday in Scotland with my
family - surely this must be part of the exhibition? I’ve never seen my dad so scared - he’s terrified and has grabbed
Harriet around the waist to get her away from the doors. His face is grey - I swear, it’s actually grey - and I know from the
decisive way that he moves that this is no joke, it’s no false panic - he’s
genuinely frightened.

It’s overcast and grey outside and at first I just assume it’s the clouds.
But the darkness in the skies has a solid, dark quality - it’s like nothing
I’ve ever seen before. As the blackness sweeps through the sky, it shuts out all light.
It’s a darkness that I can hardly comprehend - even at night there’s
always some light thrown off by street lamps or passing cars.
But this darkness has a finality about it - it’s not to be questioned. Suddenly, the heavy iron doors, which at first seemed set and fixed,
begin to groan and move very slowly.

Dad had literally propelled Harriet down the long concrete corridor - a
combination of pushing and almost throwing her - but this is the
action of a man who is the most scared I’ve ever seen anybody in my
life. It’s funny how you notice these things at times like this. In films, people act scared and make all sorts of shouting and
screaming sounds. But in real life being scared is a feeling - a terrifying sensation that is
played out in silence, not in the exaggerated shouts of a movie. And it has consequences too.

As the blackness dominates the sky and casts its deathly shadow over
the entrance of the bunker, I see Mum running towards the closing
doors - and I know that it must be too late. Today I must face my worst fears - I am going to see my Mum die
horribly in front of my own eyes, then the same thing is going to
happen to me and everybody that I love.

I can’t really remember why we decided to holiday in Scotland. Things have a habit of coming out of nowhere when you live in a big
family. One minute Dad has a great idea then David knocks something over at
the dinner table.
Dad curses, Mum tells him off (does she
really
think that we don’t hear
those words at school?) and Harriet gets covered in whatever it was
that just went flying. And out of the brawl and mayhem that follows, somehow we manage
to discuss Dad’s great holiday plan, and before you know it he’s on his
laptop, entering the competition.

Yes, this wasn’t a conventional holiday. We couldn’t afford a normal holiday. Dad had given up work two years ago ‘Because I’m so old!’ he’d joked
with us at the time. In actual fact, it was all my fault. I’d had what the teachers referred to as ‘difficulties’ at school. These ‘difficulties’ involved hushed conversations between teachers,
worried chats long into the night between Mum and Dad, and regular
visits from a very unusual man called Dr Pierce. I remembered him because he wore a brightly coloured tie which had
an unusual, metallic logo embossed on it at the bottom. That struck me as rather strange for a man who was called ‘Doctor’.
It all ended with me staying at home to be educated.

‘Home ed’ they called it.
Basically it meant that, for me, everything that I’d experienced
between the ages of five and twelve was now over.
These days I got up after Mum had gone to work. And when I did get up, Dad was there.
Dad, who’d gone to work before I left the house for ever since I can
remember. Usually he was in his pyjamas, with a cup of tea at his side and
working on something at his laptop. I joined him at the kitchen table about 9 o’clock usually.
They let me sleep in later because I lay awake at night. I don’t know why that is.
I’m tired, and I want to sleep … but I can’t. So I’m awake until well after midnight usually.
I like the world at that time of night, it’s quiet and demands nothing of
me. I love my family, but sometimes, in the middle of the night when the
rest of the world is asleep, I feel like I could inhabit that silence
forever.

I liked ‘home ed’ because I got to see more of Dad, but I still missed
Mum during the day. ‘Home ed’ was funny, because very little education took place.
I just did what I felt like doing most of the time.
And I got along fine like that.
All that anger from being at school just seemed to go.
In fact, sometimes it was hard to remember what had caused me to get
into trouble in the first place. I could remember the rage and the fury - I could remember lashing out
at those kids - but I couldn’t remember how I’d got from how I am
right now to that state where I was so out of control. And I
was
out of control at school.
It’s scary to feel that way. But now I feel totally calm, and I can’t picture what would make me
get that way again. So most of the time during the day it was just me and Dad in the
kitchen. And Nat of course, but Nat wasn’t actually in the kitchen with us.

I was nine when Nat died. I don’t really remember it as an accident.
I remember what people did, and how they reacted.
And I remember the funeral most of all.

Nat was such great fun and the funeral didn’t seem to capture any of
that life at all. Mum and Dad remember exactly what happened. I can see it in the sadness when they look at pictures of our family as it
was. It comes in an instant, usually when a random photo flashes up on a
laptop screen as it switches to screensaver. One minute, it’s almost as if Nat was never in our lives, like that space
at the table had
always
been David's.

But dead people leave a space.
It’s not a physical space.
It’s a part of our life that remains in a vacuum. And the smallest thing can let the air rush into that vacuum, filling it
with life, memories and feelings, like the person has never been gone.
All it took was a photo and Nat was back at the table with us.

We were twins. I don’t think you’d know it now, because we weren’t identical twins or
anything like that. Mum and Dad say ‘You were so alike’, but we look like two different
people to me in those photos. And if Nat was alive now, I’m sure we’d be so different.
For a start our personalities were opposite.
And we wore our hair differently even at that age.
I left mine as it was, Nat was much more adventurous.
We were different even then.
But always, we were twins. Until Nat was killed in an instant by that black car and our lives
changed forever.

I’m so hungry.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced hunger like this before.
At home we always had snacks around. Dad would nag us about eating our five-a-day or Mum would have a go
about ladling jam onto our bread. But most of the time, whenever we got peckish, there was food
around.

I’m so scared now.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here.
It’s completely dark and there’s no sound at all. I don’t know where Dad and Harriet are, they were somewhere near
David last time I saw them. I’ve shouted, but there’s nothing, just an empty echo from the long
concrete corridor. All I have is a half-drunk bottle of water.

When we got lost when we were young, Mum and Dad used to say
‘Find someone with a uniform or wait by the ticket office.’ I was by the entrance when the darkness fell.
If I had my mobile phone with me I could use the torch on it to see. I’ve tried feeling my way along the wall, but it’s terrifying walking into
a complete blackness where you can’t see anything, not even shapes
or outlines. So I did what Mum and Dad said.
I waited by the entrance.
If anybody came, that’s where they’d go. If only I’d remembered my mobile phone in the car, I’d have some light
now. And Mum wouldn’t have got caught outside when the darkness came.

Somehow we moved from a glass of lemonade getting spilled at the
dinner table to a holiday in Scotland. What Dad had been trying to say when this strand of conversation had
taken its first breath of life the previous month is ‘Who fancies
winning a holiday to Scotland?’ Within the mayhem of the spillage, a general consensus of opinion had
been reached that Scotland might be a bit of fun and we’d never been
there together as a family.

Since Dad had stopped working money had been tight. It’s funny, nobody tells you these things when you’re young, you just
pick it up from the strands of conversation and what you see going on
around you.
One minute you’re eating your favourite ice cream, the next minute
you’re stuck with own brand Neopolitan. One minute Dad’s going to work in a suit, the next minute he’s
showing you a video of a funny dog on Facebook, while he’s sitting at
the table in pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt with a band’s name on that
I’ve never heard of before. Apparently they were great in the 80’s.

We used to go on holidays abroad, and we’d all sit and look at the
brochures together. We’d fly in planes to places that were far too hot for me and once, we
even went on a ferry.
Nat loved that ferry … See - Nat again, always with us but never there.