Experiment With Destiny (28 page)

             
Cursing his self-pity he turned his thoughts to Rachel. Why did she have to die? So young and pretty, and so full of life. Although her twisted leg caused her to limp she seemed to skip through the days, and nights, without so much as a care. Her life had been cynically caged here in this miserable landscape almost from the beginning: her parent or perhaps both parents dumping her on the edge of the wasteland when she was just a few days old. Whether it was the imperfection of her leg, her testimony to some illicit affair, or perhaps she was the penultimate step toward a bankruptcy and the brink of non-citizenship…whatever the reason she’d been abandoned to a cruel fate out here while her folks continued their other world lives safe in the knowledge she was powerless to return and haunt them. Had they hoped she would perish in the cold of night? Or had they been confident the waste-dwellers would take her in, care for her and raise her as one of their own?

             
Whatever their intent, she was gone now, and Malcolm felt the full weight of her loss. He heard the clatter of debris as a rat scuttled nearby. He imagined the vermin lived without such sorrows, their only instinct was to survive. His eyes clouded over again as the emptiness Rachel had left him clung to his weary soul. Unable to contain his grief any longer he began to sob aloud for the first time in so many years.

             
Ma looked up from her steaming broth and studied him, then shed a silent tear…for Malcolm and for Rachel. Then, because she knew he would need food to sustain him when his grief was spent, she returned to her task. A sudden gust of wind howled across the broken landscape and rattled the empty window frames. She edged closer to her small cooking fire and noticed Malcolm tugging his coat tighter about him.

Around them, the endless winter gripped the decaying monuments of industry, now standing ugly beneath a hidden, miserable sun. Abandoned by the citizens, these unwanted pockets of former industrial land on the peripheries of towns and cities became home to unwanted communities of people who could no longer sustain themselves. They used to have labels, like ‘economically inactive’ and NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) but now they were simply tagged ‘non citizens’ or waste-dwellers. As though invisible to the other world, the non-people existed, nothing more, where the captains of industry once thrived. By day, their makeshift hovels were only distinguishable from the ruins by the thin wisps of smoke from their campfires. At night, those fires twinkled like weak hope against the dark rubbled fields to keep the chill at bay. Most citizens ignored these fragile traces of life, a life they could never comprehend. The more adventurous gazed on from the comforting distance, when the light faded, perhaps even believing there was something slightly romantic about this way of life.

“I’ll tell Harry there’s some food ready, shall I?” Malcolm broke the silence at last, the aroma of stewing vegetables stirring his hunger. He hadn’t eaten since before venturing into the market place on that ill-fated foray. Ma nodded, put down her spoon and stood creakily to fetch bowls from under the plastic sheeting in the adjoining room. Some of the wasteland homes were slightly better appointed. There was an abundance of unwanted furniture, old and battered and mostly needing repair, but still functional, scattered around the site. Long after the remnants of the former tenants had been harvested and recycled, the supply continued unabated as the citizens brought more…not out of charity but to avoid household bulky waste charges. One or two homes even had makeshift stoves – broken gas or electric cookers that were gutted and now used to burn whatever combustible materials could be scavenged. Ma always told him she’d like one of those, a ‘proper oven’ as she called them, but Malcolm always replied: “Travel light. We may have to move on in a hurry one day, when their bulldozers come.”

He scorned the efforts of others who tried to decorate their squalid shelters with the abandoned trappings of the society that treated them with equal disdain. “Why pretend to live like them, with all their fanciful frippery?” he would say to Ma. “We’re nothing like them…not any more. It’s useless to pretend anything other.” She heard him struggle to his feet, pausing to catch his breath before shuffling off to fetch Harry.

As he picked his way through the debris Malcolm remembered the boy. After crawling back along the alley that morning, his bones quaking in fear, he had watched the police throw Rachel’s bloodied and broken body into the skip lorry and it had made him retch. Then they returned to the boy, who had been cuffed and caged in the back of the patrol car, waiting silently for them. He’d watch one of the officers open the door and punch the boy in the face, heard him yelp like a puppy in pain. Then he’d heard them both laugh and watched them drive away before returning to salvage what he could of the pre-dawn pickings that sustained them.

The boy was alive, but for how long?

Malcolm had never liked him. Unlike Rachel, he had been born on the wastelands…to a nomad woman who’d drifted from community to community, offering her body in return for nourishment and warmth for the night. The boy’s father could have been anyone from the countless communities along the South and West of Wales. Nobody would ever know. She’d died some months ago, her body riddled with disease that Malcolm believed was the fruit of her immorality. Her son, nobody knew his name, survived alone for a week or two – waiting until the community slept before helping himself to any scraps of food and huddling beside their spent fires to squeeze out the last of the warmth. Ma had finally taken pity on the wretched urchin when she’d found him nestled sleepily between her fire and the inner wall of the warehouse early one morning. Despite Malcolm’s protests she’d invited him to stay, as company for Rachel she’d said. They boy had barely grunted an acknowledgement of Ma’s kindness. It wasn’t until days had passed that Malcolm realised he was mute.

Although he’d not minded the extra mouth to feed and body to keep warm, Malcolm did mind the way the boy had quickly made himself an ever-present companion to Rachel, and the way she’d taken so wholeheartedly to her constant shadow. Despite his lack of speech, and the fact he seemed to be perpetually wrapped up in a world of his own, they had somehow made a connection and she could be often heard giggling at him. Jealousy of their relationship, Malcolm knew, was no reason to dislike the boy. Indeed he’d told himself he should be glad that she finally had someone closer to her own age because it was uncertain how much longer he, himself, had to watch over her.

But now Rachel was dead. And the boy, who had contributed to her demise, was still alive…somewhere…but in terrible danger.

“Why should I care?” he muttered aloud to himself.

He reached the outbuilding Harry called home. Malcolm reached up to clutch the rotten doorframe and pull himself over the missing step. He felt the sharp twinge in his side and flinched with the memory…the dogs, the beatings, the naked shame as they stripped and mocked him then hosed him with freezing cold water. “Run! You stinking bastard! Run!” they had shouted, “And don’t ever let us catch you again or we won’t be so lenient next time!” And he’d run for his life…

“Harry!” he called, his old voice echoing. Those memories unsettled him. “Harry!”

Rachel was dead but the boy was alive. What would he be going through in their hands, unable to even speak for himself, so vulnerable?

Malcolm knew what the ‘Good Book’ would tell him. He knew what was expected of him. He knew what Rachel would have wanted him to do if she’d still been alive. He shuddered at the very thought…but he knew that, at the least, he would have to try…

* * *

XVII

THEY ate in silence. Malcolm listened to the wind, his head turned away from Ma and Harry. Neither pressed him for conversation, sensing it was better to leave him to his thoughts. The stew tasted good, Harry said, but Malcolm hardly noticed its flavour as he absently spooned it between his chapped lips. He was thinking about the boy.

             
When he’d returned that morning, alone, Ma had asked about Rachel and the boy. Though she tried to hide it, he could see the news had affected her deeply, shaken her to the core. Of course she made no suggestion he should go back and try and find the boy. Ma knew too well what treatment he would be receiving, and the dangers facing anyone who tried to get him back. She would never expect him to return to that cruelty and face his darkest fears. Yet Malcolm sensed that he would find no peace within himself, and that he’d always wonder if she’ll resent him for not trying. The ‘Good Book’ spoke about laying down your life for others, the supreme sacrifice…and he could vaguely recall a story about how precious the little children were and that He welcomed them to His side. ‘Suffer the children…’

             
“I’m going back to find him!” Malcolm affirmed at last. “I have to find out if he’s still alive…and if he is, I can’t just leave him to suffer…what I suffered.”

             
Ma considered him long and hard, then smiled as if it was all she could offer him, unable to put her feelings into words, mute as the boy. Harry studied him too, putting down his bowl and puffing on his roll-up cigarette.

             
“It’s a brave thing to do, no doubt! You know more than most what awaits you out there. But I expect the Good Lord will be on your side…and of course you’ll have me to look after yer and all…I can still remember a thing or two about soldiering!” Malcolm smiled, for the first time since he’d lost his little girl.

             
“Thanks Harry, but this is something I’ll have to do alone. This is my quest, and mine alone.”

             
“Now listen…”

             
“Sorry, old friend, but it’s not for discussion. We all know the dangers…I may never come back…and I need you…here…who else is going to take care of Ma if I don’t make it back? I can’t leave her on her own, with nobody to look after her!” Malcolm glanced over at her. She was scowling. He knew Ma didn’t need ‘looking after’, but he also knew he could not risk taking Harry with him among the citizens. It would never work.

             
“Well…” he saw Harry’s chest puff a little with pride. “I…suppose…”

             
“Thank you Harry…I knew I could count on you!” Malcolm reached over and clutched his friend’s hand. It was cold to the touch, despite his proximity to the warmth of the fire. Leaving them to clear away, he went to the adjoining room to gather together a few belongings he might need. He knew he’d made the right decision, but it did not stop him feeling very afraid as he gathered his tobacco tin, cigarette papers and matches, a handful of dried bread and a knife to cut it and bundled them into his deep pockets. The stew should keep him going until nightfall and the bread until morning. The rest of his needs would have to be met with improvisation.

             
Before returning to Harry and Ma, Malcolm kneeled on the unforgiving bare concrete floor and passed his hands over his chest in the sign of the cross, as he could best remember it. “Our Father…” he prayed, remembering most of the words as his mind swam with visions of the terror that awaited him.

             
Ma kissed his cheek. Harry patted his shoulder.

             
“Wish me luck!” he said, and no more as he waved solemnly over his shoulder and crossed the wasteland toward the fringes of the town, bracing myself against the harsh wind and trying his best to stick close to the derelict buildings for the shelter they provided as he picked his way. His community watched him go, following his uneven course through the rubble and the refuse. He paid no heed to them, to the huddles around the campfires or the stark faces that peered from pane-less windows. Gangs of children, younger than Rachel and the boy, scrambled among the debris in play as he pressed on toward the other world that he once, long ago, knew as home.

             
His path took him through ruins, across grim streams of lifeless water bridged by rusting pipes and around the stagnant pools swimming with detritus. Still smouldering mounds of rubbish offered him glimpses of warmth as he neared the edges of the town. The citizens had cast out their unwanted and unused and set it alight to discourage the waste-dwellers from approaching to pick these piles clean of anything of worth. As he approached the township, his path unfamiliar in the daylight, the clouded heavens began to rain. Malcolm found shelter in the shell of a former workshop unit, stood alone where its neighbours had long since fallen, ducking beneath its buckled and graffiti-ridden steel grill and hiding in the shadows as he waited for cover of darkness.

* * *

Malcolm awoke from his troubled sleep. His toes were numb with cold and his back ached from lying awkwardly against the hard concrete floor. At least he was dry, he told himself. In the darkness of the hollow workshop his eyes searched for shape and form, but he found none. He reached into his coat pocket, opened his tin and took out the cigarette he’d rolled before dropping to sleep. That was when he became aware he was not alone. There was something else, another presence, inside with him. Lighting a match, illuminating the chamber, he watched a large black rat scurry away beneath the steel grill into the rain outside, startled by the sudden flare, and he breathed a sigh of relief it had been nothing more. He would not have wanted to share his shelter with one of the nomads. He held the burning match to the end of his cigarette and drew in the comforting smoke to appease the ache in his lungs. As he smoked, he contemplated his situation.

             
His life had enjoyed something of a calmer routine in recent months, sporadically disrupted by little more than a bout of particularly harsh weather here and there, or the passing through of an unpleasant group of nomads. Even the danger of his nightly forays into town’s market place had seemed more mundane, until the last one. Malcolm knew he was at constant risk of dying through illness or being murdered in his sleep by the nomads, but such risk was an integral part of his life. This was different. Far from routine and well beyond the limits of his control, he was on the verge of a great unknown…he was about to enter the other world and walk among its unwelcoming inhabitants, who were far more dangerous and unpredictable than any nomad.

             
Fighting back his fear, he finished the cigarette and uncurled the stub to save the last traces of tar-soaked tobacco for later use. He could choose not to go, not to take the risk, but he knew he could not live with such cowardice or the regret it would anchor in his soul. What value did his life hold anyway? What does it profit a man? He had to risk his life now for the sake of saving another…

             
Pushing himself up from the floor, aware there may be other vermin cowering in the shadows around him, he ducked beneath the shutters and stepped into the waiting night. The icy drizzle clung to his face and the cold wind made his skin sting. His lungs wheezed as he began his climb along the winding trail of rubble that led to the street above, the border between two vastly different worlds.

             
He emerged onto the ring road that circled the town centre, where the market place waited. He could not guess at the time but there was very little traffic and a nearby red-bricked corner shop appeared to be closing up for the night, its security shutter halfway to its moorings. The town was almost as he remembered it, one which had long ago seen better days and owed more to the 20th century than the 21st by way of appearance, hardly brushed by progress of any kind. Malcolm began walking toward the centre, trying to remember where he would find the police station…knowing he had purposely tried to erase such knowledge after his last visit there. At the time he had planned never to return.

             
A bus passed by, splashing through the gathered puddles. Sullen faces peered out at him with marginal curiosity. He tried to bury himself deeper within his coat, as if it made him less visible to this hostile world and its hostile inhabitants. As he walked on, finding himself following the pavements alongside the rows of terraced houses, he heard the distant sounds of televisions, murmured conversations and the chink of cutlery or glasses…but he saw nothing except the flicker of lights behind the heavy curtains that veiled homes that wanted no intrusion from the deep, penetrating cold.

             
As he neared the centre the streets became a little busier and his anxiety spread from the pit of his stomach with each step. Few of the citizens paid him any heed as they passed him beneath the streetlights. He knew if they studied him a little more closely they would see at once he did not belong and would undoubtedly summon the police…but, gladly, they seemed too self-absorbed to notice and too complacent to consider anybody of his kind would dare venture here before they had long departed for their beds. Of course, summoning the police would be a quick route to finding the police station again…but Malcolm needed to retain the element of surprise if his quest had any hope of success. He would need a plan. It would be futile to arrive at the police station with no clue what to do.

             
“God help me,” he muttered beneath his breath. “Show me the way.” The boy was sure to be locked in a cell, if he was still alive. He would also be surrounded by men armed with guns, beating sticks and biting dogs. They would not stand and listen to reason, even if he could summon any. They would treat him with utter contempt – after all they had warned him never to come back, told him what would happen if he did – and then use him for their cruel sport until the last of his life ebbed away. It suddenly occurred to him that his plan to rescue the boy would have to rely on violence of his own, or at least the threat of it. He stopped walking.

             
Malcolm was lost in thought when they came upon him. A shout grabbed his attention.

             
“Hey! Fuck! Look!” He hardly had time to look up. “A fuckin’ tramp! Plain as fuckin’ daylight in front of our faces! Cheeky fucker!

“Shall we call the cops?”

“Fuck no! That’s no fun! Let’s get him!”

Before he could run he found himself flailing beneath a flurry of punches and kicks. As he reeled from their vicious blows he could hear their snarls, like the pack dogs the nomads brought with them, and smell their hot, excited breath drenched in alcohol. He staggered and fell to the pavement, trying his best to shield his face from their boots. And worst of it was not the physical pain of their assault but the emotional pain of the memories that came instantly flooding back. He heard his own voice crying out and he tasted the blood in his mouth as it trickled down his chin and mixed with the rainwater on the street.

“Watch! Careful not to get his blood on you! He’s probably a fucking AIDS carrier!”

He could feel them bearing down on him, their hatred and their rage, and he could feel the crushing weight of his utter failure, so soon into his quest…he had been so foolish…

* * *

             
Malcolm awoke. His face stung and his ribs ached. His first thought as his eyes began to focus on the tarmac was that it wasn’t heaven, or even the other place. There was a soft voice whispering in his ear but he could not make out the words. It was a woman’s voice. Slowly he realised he was lying on the roadside…and he was still alive! There was still hope…unless the police were near. He wondered how long he had been unconscious, how long he had been lying there, whether his attackers were simply waiting for him to come round so they could start again. He felt a sudden rush of panic and tried to force himself up, a sharp pain dividing his ribs and his head swimming.

             
“Are you OK?” the voice repeated, clearer now. “Should I call an ambulance?”

             
“No!” he wheezed and spluttered through the pain. “No, don’t call anyone.” He glanced around, desperately searching for his attackers, trying to think. “I’m fine! Thank you.” They were alone on the street, just the woman bending over and him.

He turned his head toward her and studied her face. It was soft and drawn with lines of compassion. Her eyes showed only compassion, no hint of fear or revulsion at being here, alone, with a waste-dweller. It was as if she hadn’t realised! Malcolm could see she was well dressed beneath her pale waterproof coat. There was a dark scarf wrapped around her neck and her gloved hands were reaching out to help him. He remembered the ‘Good Book’ story about the Samaritan.

“You should probably get up…if you can…and move from the road,” she said, her voice full of concern. “There’s not much traffic at this time of night but better safe than sorry, eh?” Malcolm nodded and summoned what remained of his strength. Despite her slender frame she managed to pull him to his feet, he knew he could not have managed alone. He hobbled over to the pavement, seeing his own blood smeared there and raising his hand to wipe his face. He glanced quickly around.