The Bunker Diary (22 page)

And here I am.

Lost.

My balance has gone.

The stuff I was thinking about earlier,
about Him Upstairs enjoying Himself … it’s true. That’s what
He’s doing. He’s just enjoying Himself. And the thing is, it doesn’t
matter what I
think about it. It doesn’t matter what anyone
thinks about it. Comprehension, judgement, disapproval … none of it matters.
All that matters to Him is His enjoyment. Because He’s all there is. Nothing else
comes into it. It’s Him alone. What He wants, what He needs, what He does.
It’s all beyond question.

That’s all there is to it.

See?

I told you it was a waste of time thinking
about it.

We finished off the meat this morning.
Stupid, really. We all know we’re not getting any more. We all know we should have
saved it, been sensible, used our brains. But our brains seem to have gone on strike.
We’re living like animals now. Living on needs. Eat, drink, breathe, get through
the day.

Tomorrow? What’s tomorrow?

Today’s tomorrow.

Today the lift is empty.

Tomorrow, too.

Bird went crazy at Jenny this afternoon.
She was in the kitchen, she told me, getting a drink of water. Bird came in, mumbling to
himself and shielding his eyes from the light, and walked over to the far wall. He
didn’t seem to notice Jenny at first. He just stood there looking at the wall for
a while, then jerked his head and started waddling around the kitchen swearing at
things.

‘Waddling?’ I said.

‘Like this …’ Jenny showed
me, walking around with her knees bent and her feet sticking out. ‘Like a
duck.’

‘A duck?’

‘Yeah. He was walking around like that
and then he just stopped in the middle of the kitchen and looked at the floor. His eyes
were all wide and starey. Then he started stamping
his feet and going
on about wasps, and then he stopped again and just stared.’

‘
Wasps?
’

‘I think so. It was a bit hard to
understand what he was saying. He was talking all funny, like he had a wet mouth. I
think
it was wasps.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I went over and offered him a drink
of water. He went
mad
, Linus. Knocked the cup out of my hand and yelled at me,
then pushed me away.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘No, he just pushed me. Then he
waddled out.’

She’s staying with me tonight.

She told me a joke. This duck goes into the
chemist’s. It goes up to the make-up counter and says, ‘I’d like a
tube of lipstick, please. And would you put it on my bill.’

Duck = 29.

Wasp = 30.

The world keeps turning.

It’s been a long day. Full of cold
and hunger. Everything is that much harder without food. Hunger is a slow and lowering
thing. It creeps up on you. You lose strength and you lose heart. And the cold saps your
energy, saps your will to do anything. Not that I’ve got much will left anyway.
Whatever
will
is. Hope, determination, optimism, grit …

Words.

The cold gets into your bones and drains the
life from your blood. It
hurts
. I’ve been cold before. I know what
it’s like. I’ve been cold and hungry before. I know what
that’s
like. But knowing what something’s like doesn’t
make it any easier. You just know what it’s like.

And besides, it’s different down here.
Down here, the cold is … I don’t know. It’s just different. Colder
than cold. Underground cold. Everywhere. Unrelenting.

Jenny can’t stand it. It makes her
cry.

This morning we ripped up a bible and lit a
fire on the floor. Just a small one. Nothing fancy. Just a ragged pile of crumpled pages
arranged in a circle. I lit it with Fred’s cigarette lighter.

Click, crackle.

The magic of fire.

The flames were just beginning to flicker
when the grille in the ceiling started to hiss and a fine spray of water came raining
down. Jenny shrieked and cowered against the wall and I just sat
there, soaking wet and freezing cold, watching the flames splutter and die.

After a few minutes the water stopped.

The half-burned bible pages were slopped in
a puddle on the floor.

I looked up at the grille. Water was
dripping slowly from the mesh – plip plip … plip … plip – like tears
from a metal eye.

Murder beat in my heart.

Later on the noise started. That infernal
racket he tortured us with before, the drums, the screeching, the wailing – shaking the
walls, shaking our bones, making us weep and hold our heads and curl up on our beds like
babies.

It lasted a long time, but it’s over
now.

A woman once told me how to deal with scary
things. She was a psychiatrist, or a psychotherapist or something. I don’t know.
Is there a difference? Doesn’t matter. She was one of those whispery women, all
calm and relaxing. Long skirt, pale face, pale lips. She wore a small polished stone on
a piece of string around her neck. Black and shiny, egg-shaped. I asked her what it was
for. She said it helped to dissipate negative energy. Yeah, right, I thought. Negative
energy. A polished stone … 
that’s
going to work, isn’t
it? That’s really going to help.

Anyway, what she told me was …

Let me think.

It was something to do with unresolved
fears.

Yeah, I remember.

She said, ‘Imagine something that
frightens you, Linus. Something that’s going to happen, say. A situation.
Something you’re worried about. Can you do that for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Are you doing it
now?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, now imagine that you can
fly.’

‘Fly?’

‘Like a bird.’

‘Ri-ght …’

‘You can fly into the
future.’

‘The future?’

‘You can do it, Linus. All you have to
do is fly up into the air … fly into the future, and then look down and
see
yourself in the situation you’re worried about. You’re
there, right now. You’re
in
this situation. Do you understand?
You’re there. Are you there?’

‘Yeah,’ I lied.

‘Good. Now look down at yourself. You
can see yourself … you’re there. See? It’s all right. You’re
coping. Do you see? It’s not so bad, is it?’

I couldn’t work out whether to nod or
shake my head. So I did something in between, a kind of diagonal, side-to-side nod. It
didn’t make any difference, there was absolutely nothing in my mind anyway.

Whispery-woman carried on. ‘Now, fly
on a bit more, a bit further into the future, and imagine yourself when it’s all
over. You’ve been through this worrying situation and now everything is all right.
Look, you can
see
yourself. You’re fine. You can feel
yourself … feel yourself, Linus. It feels OK, doesn’t it?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Good. Now, soak up that feeling, soak
it right up into your body and remember it. Remember how it feels. Now turn round and
fly back to
now
, all the time keeping that good feeling inside you.
OK?’

‘OK.’

She smiled. ‘That’s it.
That’s all you have to do, Linus. Look forward,
see
yourself feeling
good, soak it up and remember it. Remember the future. Remember how it feels, and
it’ll be all right.’

‘What if it’s not?’ I
said.

‘Pardon?’

‘What if I look forward and it’s
not
all right? What if I’m
right
to be worried?’

‘Ah,’ she smiled reassuringly,
‘but it
will
be all right. You have to make it all right.’

‘But –’

‘Look, let me go over it
again …’

I gave up in the end. Stopped listening.
Tuned out. Yeah, right, yeah, I see, OK, great …

And that was that.

I don’t know what time it is now.
Probably about 10 or 11 at night. To tell you the truth, I’m too scared to go
outside and look at the clock. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on. Jenny is with
me, and we’ve got the chair jammed up against the door.

Bird’s been at it all night –
screaming, swearing, stomping about, jabbering away like a lunatic. I saw him earlier
on, about an hour after he’d gone loopy with Jenny. I was heading down the
corridor towards the bathroom and he was just standing
in his doorway,
watching my every step. His face was a horrible shade of red, almost purple, and his
skin was stretched as tight as a drum.

‘Lye-nus,’ he drawled, his voice
all slurred. ‘Hey, Lye-nus. Wanna see this?’ He grinned a horror-grin and
tugged violently at the open wound on his neck. His fingers bloodied. He licked at them,
jabbed a crooked finger at me, and started chanting: ‘Li
nus
Li
nus
Li
nus
Li
nus
 …’

I walked away, my heart beating hard.

Fred came to see us later.

‘Stay in here,’ he said.
‘Keep the chair against the door. Bird’s having a whack attack.’

‘It’s the dog bite,’ I
said. ‘He’s got blood poisoning or something.’

‘Yeah, I know. Just stay in here, OK?
He’s been reading that stupid note. You know, the killing note. He just keeps
reading it, over and over again. I don’t think he’ll actually do anything,
but you never know.’

‘What about you?’

‘Me?’ Fred grinned. ‘You
don’t have to worry about me. I’m invincible.’

‘Where’s Russell?’

‘Barricaded in his room.’

‘Anja?’

Fred shook his head. ‘She keeps trying
to talk to Bird. She thinks she can reason with him. I told her it wasn’t safe,
but she wouldn’t listen. You know what she’s like.’

An image of Anja suddenly flashed into my
mind, the Anja of six weeks ago. A confident-looking woman dressed in a sheer white top,
short black skirt, tights, and high heels. Late twenties,
well-spoken,
honey-blonde hair, fine nose, sculpted mouth, perfect teeth, silver necklace. It was a
far cry from the Anja of today – skinny, wretched, shabby and dirty, holed up in a
stinking white room …

The trouble with people like Anja is they
have no sense of danger. They don’t know what fear is. They spend all their lives
cocooned in comfort, and the only fears they ever know are the small ones – worries,
anxieties, trifles. Anja has probably never had to be afraid before, not
really
afraid. And if you don’t know how to be afraid, you’re in trouble.

Fear serves a purpose.

It’s not just for watching spooky
films or riding rollercoasters. It’s there for a reason.

It keeps us alive.

It’s getting on for midnight now.
Fred’s gone. Jenny’s asleep. I’m sitting against the wall, listening
to the expectant silence and wondering what’s going to happen. I know
something’s going to happen. I can feel it in the air. It’s just a matter of
what and when.

It’s quiet outside.

The silence hums.

It’s going to be a long night.

So much has changed since I last wrote.