Futuretrack 5 (22 page)

I knocked, was about to knock again, when I heard a shuffling. I remembered Vic Huggett with a shudder.

But he was nothing like Vic, except he hadn’t shaved and had a considerable paunch under his dirty blue T-shirt. His massive arms, folded across his paunch, were tattooed: marion my love and death before dishonour. He had a beaky nose, wrinkles round his eyes, and might once have been a sailor.

He looked at me, without hopelessness or hate: not an Unnem, then.

No superior, watchful smirk: not a Tech, either.

No bossy, fake bonhomie: no Est.

He just yawned, without bothering to put his hand across his mouth.

“Kilo of tomatoes, please.” I kept it as short as possible. He led the way, wordlessly, to a black-tarred shed. Inside smelled heavenly: creosote, rope, soil, and the overpowering smell of fruit. Rows of brown paper bags, already weighed.

“Take yer pick.”

I picked up a punnet of strawberries with one hand, a bag of tomatoes with the other. Then realised I hadn’t paid. Tried putting five coins in his hand, without put ting down either bag. One coin fell on the floor. We stooped for it, together.

“Don’t bother … no bother,” said the man, gasping a bit with the effort. He’d totally lost interest in me. I only had to walk away. Perversely, I suddenly wanted to talk. “Nice day!”

“Urn,” he said. “Tara.” Turned and began looping up a piece of hairy string that trailed from the tarry wall of the shed.

We took a long, long road, quaintly called Nine Mile Bank. The bank ran along above us, to our left, seemingly forever. No turnoffs.

“If we don’t stop soon, I’ll die of thirst.” The tomatoes and strawberries lay safe between my belly and Keri’s back; their knobbly coolness tempted me beyond endurance.

“There’s no place to hide.”

“Stop trying to hide. That guy didn’t care. The chopper didn’t care. Different rules, here. They’ll only notice if we
try
to hide.”

So we left the bike by the roadside and climbed the bank. There was a canal at the top, deep blue, reflecting the sky. The wind was blowing along it, making big waves. Reeds hissed, shone pale green in the westering sun, like pointed sword blades. Further down, two swans were swimming.

We lay and ate tomatoes far too big for our mouths. Juice squirted and dribbled. Keri giggled. “Wash while you eat. What do you call these things?”

“Tomatoes. The others are strawberries.”

“Like in tomato soup?”

“There are no tomatoes in your horrible tinned tomato soup. Totally synthetic. Tomato flavour is one of the easiest to fake. I can give you the formula. …”

“Shut up, bighead!”

We rode on, eventually. Came to a village with an old grey church towering high above the rooftops. Keri stopped.

“What’s that—a Paramil watchtower?”

“It’s a church, stupid.”

“Oh! I read a book with a church in it once. I thought they were only in books. Weren’t they lucky to have this little hill to put the church on?”

I laughed. “You know what that hill’s made of? Five hundred years of buried dead bodies. So many, they’ve raised the earth level ten feet.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Come and look at the tombstones. …”

She spent ages among the tombstones, rubbing away moss and spelling out the old Gothic lettering with great persistence. “Here’s a little girl who died when she was two. In 1852. Isn’t that
sad?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. …” I got up to go.

“Don’t you think it would be nice to be buried, instead of burned? People can come and bring flowers. I had a girl friend, when I started racing. The one I drank champagne with. We burned her. Now I can’t even remember her name. I wish she was here.” She started to tidy the grave, pulling out the long-dead grass.

“Come and see the church,” I said, quickly.

She gasped at the church. “It’s all crumbling and falling to bits!”

“So would you be, after five hundred years.”

“Isn’t it made of concrete?”

“No—limestone and flint.”

“What’s limestone? What’s flint?”

“I can’t spend the rest of my life answering questions. …”

“Why not? I thought you fancied me.”

We mooched round the interior, full of withered hymnbooks, mouse dirt and bell ropes. She read all the memorials. “Cripes, don’t they forget
nobody
round here?” She squinted up at the ceiling and gave a jump.

“Cripes—angels.” She backed toward the door.

“They won’t bite you—they’re carved out of wood.”

“But they’re bigger than people—all that golden hair an’ wings. Angels were in that book I read, too.”

She was silent, slapping her leather gauntlet on a bench end. Then she said, “That stuff about God is all Est crap, isn’t it?”

I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know.”

“Cripes—the great brain finally admits he doesn’t know. Can we go up the tower?”

“If it’s not locked.”

“Nothing’s locked here. Aren’t they frightened the Fighters will come and smash these coloured winders? An’ pinch them gold candlesticks?”

“What Fighters? You’ll find no Fighters here.”

We climbed the narrow, dark spiral stair.

“I feel like a worm climbing a corkscrew,” said Keri.

We peered down on the village, as if it was a map. Clouds of rooks were circling round us, cawing in the churchyard elms. “I wouldn’t mind being a bird,” she said. “How fast can they fly?”

“They can do about fifty, with the wind behind them.”

“Kit—I’d like to be buried here. Could you fix it?” No.

“Useless, stupid Est.”

Nobody spoke to us; nobody came. Keri put a credit in the box for the tower-restoration fund. I had to stop her signing her real name in the visitors’ book. Riding away, she said, “Nothing happened there. Nobody could ever prove we were in that church at all. It makes me feel like a ghost.”

“Don’t start kidding yourself you’re invisible.”

But we might as well have been. We only saw one copper, in shirtsleeves and pointed hat, talking to two women and a dog. Everybody else was busy, mowing lawns, cleaning windows. Blokes with their heads inside the bonnets of vintage cars, old Astras and Cavaliers that any Est would have given his eyeteeth for, and smothered in new enamel and polish. But these were broken down and rusty, with blind headlights and dung-spattered number plates. Car jacks lying carelessly in the gutter, and children’s bikes and even ancient teddy bears.

“Why doesn’t anybody
steal
them?”

Uncut hedges, sprouting ten feet in the air; lines of ragged, multicoloured washing…

“Ain’t anybody in charge? Everybody’s just doing what they like… All
talking.”
Everywhere we looked, there were little groups talking and laughing.

She pulled up again, outside a butcher’s. Outside hung huge sides of beef, whole carcasses of pigs, scraped so clean their skin looked human. Rows of skinned sheeps’ heads, some looking cocky and some looking stupid and some just looking dead. Flies crawling all over them.

“Not very hygienic,” I said.

“Poor things, they look so sad. …”

“People have to eat. What d’you think’s in that horrible pink luncheon meat you’re so fond of?”

“Oh,
no!”

“Don’t worry. I doubt what you’ve eaten over the years has been responsible for the death of anything more than a soya bean.”

She was seized with an insatiable urge to shop. Pounds of apples. Old-fashioned boxes of matches made of real wood. Brands of fags I’d never heard of. I was frightened she might be noticed, but the shopkeepers served her without a break in their gossip. We pushed on.

“This is heaven. …”

“No, it’s not. Look!”

Two hundred yards ahead, a Wire stretched across the countryside. A gate, with Paramils. A motorway, full of robos. Unbearable; we turned back, quick.

“This is another enclave,” I said. “Fifty miles across, but just another enclave.”

“An enclave for what?”

“I think it’s called the Fens. They grow all the fresh vegetables and meat. …”

“For the bloody Ests!”

“Yeah, but there’s something funny. It’s too big… too historical… too
preserved.
I’m just starting to realise how little they ever told us Techs. And the Ests never wanted to know. …”

“They never told us Unnems
nothing.”

“I wonder if this has something to do with Scott-Astbury?”

Her face pinched up. “Shut up. I’m
happy.”

Ely was like a huge village. It was market day, and even the enormous towers of the cathedral seemed engulfed by the market that flourished round their base. Mountains of cauliflowers, cascades of carrots with the earth still sticking to them. Piled crates of pigeons, hens, rabbits.

“Them hens isn’t for eating, are they?” “No. Hens lay eggs. Rabbits is for eating.” “What—even them baby ones?” There was a hutch full of babies, flaked-out asleep with terror or boredom. But one, chinchilla blue, was standing on its hind legs and peering out at us.

“That one wants to
live
—let’s buy him.”

“Don’t be daft. How can we cope with a rabbit?”

“He wants to be free. He
trusts
us.”

“More fool him.” I looked from her to the rabbit. They looked a right daft pair, her eyes shining, its nose twitching. The rabbit pummelled the wire, as if it sensed its moment had come.

“That rabbit,” I said, “is a very bad chooser. I’d rather be rabbit pie than go to a lobo-farm.” But I asked the guy how much it was.

“Three credits to you, mate. Fatten up nicely, with plenty of dandelion.” I thought Keri was going to hit him.

As far as I know, that rabbit was the first ever to enter Ely Cathedral. Perhaps the verger mistook it for a fur collar on Keri’s leathers. It nibbled furtively at her hair, as we walked round the massive columns of the nave.

“I’m sure God exists,” announced Keri, squinting shrewdly up at the soaring vaulting of the crossing tower. “Why else would they go to all this bother?”

At dusk, we were idling through yet another village, conserving our batteries, when a delightful smell hit us, making our diet of fruit feel suddenly sloshy and unfilling. There was a dim, rosy window at the end of the street.

DE-LISH FISH BAR

YOUR SATISFACTION IS OUR JUSTIFICATION

THE FINEST FRIED FISH IN THE FENS

MUSHY PEAS SPECIAL lc

EELS OUR SPECIALITY

DO NOT LEAN BIKES AGAINST THIS WINDOW.

There was a gaggle of ancient petrol-driven motorbikes parked against the window: AJS, Ariel, Norton, even a Scott Flying Squirrel. We pushed our noses against the steamed-up glass. Inside, by the light of red-shaded wall lamps with tasseled fringes, a man and woman in filthy whites were dumping avalanches of potatoes and dripping fish into great shining troughs.

“Techs?” asked Keri slyly; dodged before I could kick her.

An avid crowd of guys in old-fashioned fringed leathers waited, punching each other in the kidneys cheerfully, or shaking salt and vinegar into each other’s greasy hair.

“Two whales and chips, please, Agnes!”

“Two battered cod and three battered wives.”

“I’ll batter you,” said Agnes, raising a large implement dripping with fat.

“You won’t get a better offer, Razzer. She’s dead kinky wi’ that fish slice. Better’n flagellation.”

Keri said, “What are chips?”

“Let’s go and find out.”

When we came out with our sizzling packets, there was a crowd around Mitzi.

“Trouble?” muttered Keri.

“Leave this to me.” We strolled over.

“This your bike, mate?”

“What’ll she do?”

“Right snazzer—shaft-driven.”

“Funny tires.” They kicked them affectionately, making Mitzi wobble.

“Where’s the petrol tank?”

“Mitsubishi—Jap, right? Tommo here’s got an old Honda.”

“What about a ride?” asked Razzer, a big kid with a shock of black hair and heavy jaw, obviously the leader. I got astride and gave him the nod. As he was settling, I shot off, making three kids jump for their life. Razzer enjoyed that. When we got to Nine Mile Bank, I fed on the juice, nearly left him sitting in the road.

“Not bad.” He leaned his unhelmeted face across my shoulder and read the speedo. “Hundred an’ eighty. Miles?”

“Kilometres.”

He whistled. “Engine’s got a funny beat.”

“Electric.”

“Electric starter?”

“All electric.”

“You’re kidding? …”

A suspicion was forming in my mind. When we got back to the mob I announced, “This is the famous Keri Roberts.”

“Hi, Kerry,” they said, casually as if I’d announced she was Margi or Jane.

They had no idea who she was at all.

“Haven’t you seen her on the Box?” I asked.

“What box? A top box? She can sit on my top box
any
time.”

Then I knew why the houses had no TV aerials…

We spent another half-hour, giving them rides. In return, they let Keri ride theirs. She did a wheelie at sixty, the whole length of the village street. Got happier and happier, just as she had with the Glasgow Racers, at first. Only these weren’t like Racers; they kept on playing daft tricks and laughing. We all got on so well that I finally popped the sixty-four-credit question.

“Is there anywhere we can stay the night? Bike’s a bit low on juice…”

There was a horrible hush. They looked at us, as if seeing us for the first time. As if others before us had asked that question, and it had always meant trouble.

Then Razzer said, “We’ll take you to Pete. Pete’ll fix it.”

“Pete fixes our bikes.”

“He can fix anything.”

“It’s your head needs fixing, Tommo. Even Pete can’t fix that.”

We all went off to see Pete.

Pete lived in a straggling village called Manea. They left us with him; roaring off, shouting good night loudly, as if glad to get away from a funeral.

Pete finished waving and turned to us. Odd-looking bloke, bald on top but with a mass of wild red locks lower down, so that his hair looked as if it was slipping off his head. He had a long, shiny nose and small, shrewd blue eyes. There were still white wood-shavings in his hair and beard, and he was still chewing his supper. Bacon and eggs, from his breath.