The Bunker Diary (15 page)

08.45: Jenny comes in. We talk. She has a
rash on her leg, tiny bites. I make a mental note to add lemons to today’s
shopping list. I seem to remember that lemon juice is good for flea bites.

08.55: Fred wanders in, shirtless,
scratching his belly. He doesn’t say much. He ruffles Jenny’s hair. I tell
him I want to see him later. He says OK, makes a cup of coffee, wanders back to his
room.

09.00: the lift comes down. Food, juice,
fruit, milk. Jenny helps me put it all away.

09.30: it’s Bird’s turn to make
breakfast, but he forgets. Jenny makes toast. We eat together. I make some coffee and
take it in to Russell. I want to talk to him about something, but his head is bad, so I
leave him alone and go back to the kitchen.

The rest of the day drags on. The clock is
set on slow. I talk to Fred, check on Russell, help Jenny with the cleaning. I lie down
and think some more about the garden. I remember my clothes, my pale-blue shorts, my
brown striped T-shirt, my sandals. I remember clutching a bamboo cane and a bottle of
orange squash in my dirty hands, and I remember my daydreams. My
imaginations. The garden is Africa, America, a desert plain of uncut grass, with
rabbits’ ears and ragged red roses. I remember plucking a rose thorn, licking it,
and sticking it to my nose, making myself into a rhinoceros. Then, imagining rhinos and
lions, I whip my bamboo cane at a big red ball, miss it, and the thorn falls off. I kick
the ball and it sails up and over the rockery into a bed of red-hot pokers, flattening a
full-bloomed stem. I glance quickly at the back door to check that Mum’s not
looking, then I scurry back up the garden to see if I can fix the broken flower. But I
can’t. So I snap it off and stuff it deep down into the base of the hedge. I know
that Mum won’t look in there, because she’s scared of the slow-worms.

But what if she does?

And now my heart is hot with the memory of
what happened early one summer when I stripped all the petals from Mum’s pansies
and she got really angry again.

‘You little
sod
!’

Nasty eyes.

‘What do you think you’re
doing
? What’s this?’

She’s holding up a jam jar full of
murky water. Bits of stick and pansy petals are suspended in the pale-brown goo. Insects
too. And grass. Bugs. Leaves. Moss. Woodlice. Worms. Snails. A slug. Stones. Gravel.
Mud.

What’s this? A garden concoction,
that’s what it is.

What do you think you’re doing?
I’m collecting things in a water-filled jam jar and mixing them all up, just to
see what happens. That’s what I’m doing.

‘What
is
it?’ Mum
snaps.

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you think you’re
doing
?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Come here.’

I can’t move.

‘Come
here
!’ She shoves
the jam jar into my hands. ‘Get rid of it. Go
on … 
now
!’

I start to cry. ‘Where?’

‘Just get rid of it.’

I take it up the garden path and start to
empty it by the roses.

‘
Not
THERE!
’

I see her standing in the doorway, a
cigarette burning in her hand, and I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.

‘Just leave it,’ she spits.
‘Put it down.’ She draws hard on her cigarette. ‘
PUT IT
DOWN!
’

I place the jam jar gently on the lawn,
taking care not to spill it. The murky water rolls in the glass. I see bits of insects,
beetle-wing boats, a black slug floating like a whale …

‘Come here.’

I shuffle down the path. My eyes are
stinging. I need a wee. Mum grabs my arm and swings me round and slaps the back of my
thigh.

‘You little
shit
.’

And again –
whack!
 – really
hard.

‘Get upstairs.’

I go up to my room and cry my heart out.

Sometime later she brings me biscuits and a
glass of milk.

‘Linus?’ she says softly.
‘Linus?’

I can’t speak. I’m
trembling.

‘It’s all right now,’ she
whispers. ‘Everything’s all right. I won’t tell Daddy. Daddy
doesn’t have to know …’

I don’t know if any of this is
true.

I can’t sleep. I’m
trembling.

Yesterday I tried to escape.

It didn’t work, and now we’re
all suffering for it.

Before I tried it, I wrote down what I
planned to do in a page of my notebook and showed it to the others. Jenny thought it was
a good idea. Bird and Anja thought it was a waste of time. Russell thought it was too
risky. Fred didn’t seem to think much of it either, but at least he was willing to
give it a go. And eventually he persuaded the others to give it a go too. He can be very
persuasive when he wants to.

So yesterday evening, about half an hour
before the lift was due to go up, we got started.

While Jenny and Fred were in the kitchen,
cooking up some bacon, I took a roll of bin liners down to the bathroom and began
filling one with whatever rubbish I could find. At a prearranged signal, Jenny
‘accidentally’ knocked over the frying pan, spilling bacon fat on to the
cooker, and screamed
Fire!
Then she ran back to her room. As the flames spread
on the cooker, Bird and Anja came running out of their rooms, shouting at the tops of
their voices. Meanwhile, Fred had broken a leg off one of the dining-table chairs,
dipped the end in the burning bacon fat, and set light to it. He quickly wrapped his
head in
a sheet, got up on the table and started poking the burning
table leg at the grille in the ceiling.

While all this was going on I stayed in the
bathroom, and as soon as all the shouting started I got to work. I had to move fast.

1) empty the rubbish out of the bin
liner.

2) tear off five more bags from the
roll.

3) quickly start stuffing one bag into
another, then another, then another …

4) until I’d made a super-strong bin
bag (six liners thick).

They were the extra-large bin liners, the
ones you use for garden refuse. We hadn’t specifically asked for them, and I
don’t know why He’d sent them down. I don’t suppose He thought it
mattered. Or maybe He did, thinking about it now. Maybe He knew what He was doing all
along. Anyway, they were the extra-large bin liners, and I’m pretty small for my
age, so when I climbed inside the super-strong bin liner, crouched down low, and
scrunched myself up as tightly as possible, there was still enough room to fold the bin
liner over my head.

And then I just waited.

Hoping.

Wondering …

I could hear all the racket going on
outside – Fred cursing, Anja and Bird shouting – and then all at once that horrible
piercing whistle started screaming out again. Not for long, but long enough to hurt.

And then suddenly it was quiet again.

I waited in the black plastic darkness.

Hoping, wondering …

Had He seen me making the bag?

Had He seen me getting into it?

Had the diversion worked?

Had I made the super-strong bin bag strong
enough?

I waited.

Keeping perfectly still.

After a while I heard Fred’s footsteps
coming along the corridor. The bathroom door opened, his footsteps came closer, then the
bin bag opened and he tipped some rubbish over my head. Not much, just enough to cover
me. The bag closed. I felt him grip the bag and lift, and I held my breath,
half-expecting the bag to split open, but it didn’t. And then I was being carried
along the corridor.

Like I said, I’m not that big, and I
don’t weigh very much at the best of times, but it was still a pretty remarkable
feat. Fred had to carry me as if I weighed nothing, as if I was just a bag full of
rubbish. Incredible. It was a very strange feeling, being carried along like a bag full
of rubbish, and at one point I almost started laughing. I imagined myself as a tiny
little man being carried home in a bag of shopping by an unsuspecting shopper, and when
the shopper got home and started unpacking the bags, I’d jump out and scare them
to death.

Doesn’t sound very funny, does it?

You had to be there, I suppose.

I could feel Fred turning left now, heading
along the little corridor towards the lift. And then, as gently as possible, but without
making it too obvious that he was being gentle, Fred dropped me down inside the lift and
left me there. Just another bag of rubbish.

All I had to do now was wait until nine
o’clock and hope that 1) the lift went up as usual, 2) The Man Upstairs
hadn’t
seen me getting into the bin liner, and 3) He
hadn’t been watching too carefully as Fred carried me along the corridor.

It was quite a lot to hope for.

Time passed slowly.

I waited.

Not moving.

Trying not to breathe too hard.

Then, after a few minutes, the lift door
closed.

Tkk-kshhh-mmm
 …

I held my breath again.

The lift lurched and started going up.

Nnnnnnnn
 …

I couldn’t believe it.

I was moving, I was going up, out of the
bunker.

The lift stopped.

G-dung, g-dunk
.

Everything was quiet.

I waited.

Nothing.

The door stayed closed.

I waited.

Nothing.

Then I heard a very faint hiss. A gassy
sound. And a few moments later I smelled it. A chemical smell, not unpleasant. Like a
hospital smell. Clean and gassy and …

‘Oh, shit,’ I muttered.

And that was it.

I don’t remember anything else.

Just senselessness.

When I woke up I was lying on my bed, back in
my room, with a throbbing head and gummy eyes and a terrible ache in my stomach. I was
shivering violently. It was freezing cold. My eyes felt as if they were glued together
and there was a nasty sour taste in the back of my throat. I sat up, groaned, and
cracked open my eyes.

Russell was sitting in the chair across the
room.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Uh … ?’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Like shit,’ I said, rubbing goo
from my eyes. ‘What happened?’

He gassed us all, that’s what
happened. Me in the lift, the others in the bunker. They were unconscious for about
three hours. I was out for nearly twelve. He sent me back down in the lift. When the
others came round they got me out and put me to bed.

‘You didn’t look too good for a
while,’ Russell said. ‘We were all quite worried about you. Especially
Jenny.’

‘Is she OK?’

‘As well as can be
expected.’

‘Good.’ I shivered.
‘Why’s it so cold?’

‘He’s turned the heating
off.’

‘Punishment, I suppose?’

Russell nodded. ‘That’s not all,
I’m afraid. While we were all unconscious, He came down and removed all the food
and drink from the kitchen. All we’ve got left is water.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but all that
came out was a hacking cough that turned me inside out.

It’s late now. I’m not feeling
too bad. Not physically, anyway. I went in to see Jenny a while ago. She cried when she
saw me. She said she thought I was dying.

‘I’m not going to die,’ I
told her. ‘I’m as tough as old boots.’

‘No you’re not,’ she said.
‘You’re weedy, like me.’

I smiled. ‘I’m not
weedy
.’

She wiped her nose. ‘You
are.’

‘Yeah, well … us weedies are
stronger than we look, aren’t we? We have Weedy Power.’

She grinned. ‘Weedy Power?
What’s that?’

‘It’s the stuff the others
don’t have. The stuff that keeps us going. Me and you, the Super Weeds.’

‘Yeah.’

I didn’t know what I was talking
about. It felt all right though. It still feels all right. And as I sit here in bed
writing these thoughts, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time, maybe
never. I feel a closeness. It’s a huge and overwhelming feeling that cancels out
everything else, and I don’t know what to do with it. It’s so good
it’s beyond good, but at the same time it’s unbearable. It fills me with
visions of blackness and pain.

I can’t say any more.