The Memoirs of a Survivor (15 page)

Usually, when a column of people left for the journey north or west, people came out of the buildings to say goodbye, to wish them well, to send messages to friends and relatives who had gone on ahead. That morning only four people came. I and Hugo sat quietly in our window watching as the tribe arranged itself and left, without fuss or farewells. Very different this departure from earlier ones, which had been so boisterous and gay. These people were subdued, seemed apprehensive, made themselves small and inconspicuous inside their furs: this caravan of theirs would make rich booty.

Emily did not even watch.

At the very last moment Gerald came out with half a dozen of the children, and they stood on the pavement until the last cart with its cackling load had gone out of sight beyond the church at the corner. Gerald turned then, and led his flock back inside the building. He saw me and nodded, but without smiling. He looked strained - as well he might. Even to see that band of infant savages was enough to make one’s stomach muscles tighten in anxiety. And he lived among them, day and night: I believe he had run out with them to stop them attacking the loaded carts.

That night there was a knock on the door, and four of the children stood there: they were wild-eyed and excited. Emily simply shut the door on them and locked it. Then she put heavy chairs against it. A scuffling and whispering -the footsteps retreated.

Emily looked at me, and mouthed over Hugo’s head - it took me a few moments to work it out:
Roast Hugo
.

‘Or roast Emily,’ I said.

A few minutes later we heard screams coming from along the street, then the sound of many rushing feet, and children’s shrill voices in triumph - all the sounds of a raid, a crime. We pushed aside our heavy curtains and were in time to see, through a glimmer from the snow that was being lit by a small moon, Gerald’s gang, but without Gerald, dragging something up the front steps. It looked like a body. It need not have been anything of the kind, could have been a sack or a bundle. But the suspicion was there, and strong enough to make us believe it.

We sat on through the night quietly by our fire, waiting, listening.

There was nothing to prevent one or all of us becoming victims at any moment.

Nothing. Not the fact that Gerald, by himself or with a selection of the children, or even some of the children by themselves, might come down to visit us in the most normal way in the world. They brought us gifts. They brought flour and dried milk and eggs; sheets of polythene, sellotape, nails, tools of all kinds. They gave us fur rugs, coal, seeds, candles. They brought … the city around was almost empty, and all one had to do was to walk into unguarded buildings and warehouses and take what one fan
cied. But most of what was there were things no one would ever use again or want to: things that, in a few years’ time, if some survivor found them, he would have to ask: What on earth could this have been for?

As these children did already. You would see them squatting down over a pile of greeting cards, a pink nylon fluted lampshade, a polystyrene garden dwarf, a book or a record, turning them over and over:
What was this for? What did they do with it?

But these visits, these gifts, did not mean that in another mood, on another occasion, they would not kill. And because of a whim, a fancy, an impulse.

Inconsequence …

Inconsequence again, as with the departure of little June. We sat there and brooded about it, talked about it, listening - far above our heads there was the neigh of a horse, and sheep baa-ing; birds whirled up past our windows on their way to the top of the building where there were the pickings of a farmyard for the effort of hopping through a broken window, was a vegetable garden, and even some trees. Inconsequence, a new thing in human psychology. New? Well, if it had always been there, it had been well channelled, disciplined, socialized. Or we had become so used to the ways we saw it shown that we did not recognize it.

Once, not long ago, if a man or woman shook you by the hand, offered you gifts, you would have reason to expect that he, she, would not kill you at the next meeting because the idea had just that moment come into his head … this sounds, as usual, on the edge of farce. But farce depends on the normal, the usual, the standard. Without the
norm
,
which is the source of farce, that particular form of laughter dries up.

I remembered June, when she first robbed my flat and I asked Emily: ‘But why me?’ The reply was: Because you are here, she knows you. Even: Because you are a friend.

We could believe that the children from upstairs might come down one night and kill us because we were their friends. They knew us.

One night, very late, sitting around the fire as it burned low, we heard voices outside the door and outside the window. We did not move or look for weapons. The three of us exchanged looks - it cannot be said that they were amused, no: we did not have so much philosophy, but I do claim these glances were of the order of humour. That morning we had given food to some of those brats who were outside now. We had sat eating with them.
Are you warm enough? Have another piece of bread. Would you like some more soup?

We could not protect ourselves against so many: thirty or more in all, whispering beyond the door, below the window. And Gerald? No, that we could not believe. He was asleep, or away on some expedition.

Hugo turned himself, placing himself between Emily, whom he would defend, and the door. He looked at me, suggesting I should put myself between her and the window: of course it was Emily who must be defended.

The scuffling and whispering went on. There were some blows on the door. More scuffles. Then a burst of sound -shouts, and feet rushing away. What had happened? We did not know. Perhaps Gerald had heard of what they were doing, and had come to stop them. Perhaps they had simply changed their minds.

And next day some of the children, with Gerald, came down to us and we spent a pleasant time together … I can say it, I can write it. But I cannot convey the normality of it, the ordinariness of sitting there, chatting, sharing food, of looking into a childish face and thinking: Well, well, it might have been you who planned to stick a knife into me last night!

And so it all went on.

We did not leave. If someone had asked: Do you mean to say that you two people are staying here, in danger, instead of leaving the city for the country where things are safe or safer, because of that animal, that ugly, bristly old beast there - you are prepared to die yourselves of hunger or cold or of being murdered, simply because of that beast! - then we would have said: Of course not, we are not so absurd, we put human beings where they belong, higher than beasts, to be saved at all costs. Animals must be sacrificed for humans, that is right and proper and we will do it too, just like everybody else.

But it was not a question of Hugo any longer.

The question was, where would we be going? To what? There was silence from out there, the places so many people had set off to reach. Silence and cold … no word ever came back, no one turned up again on our pavements and reported: ‘I’ve come back from the north, from the west, and I ran into so and so and he said…’

No, all we could see when we looked up and out were the low, packed clouds of that winter hurrying towards us: dark cloud, dark, cold cloud. For it snowed. The snow came down, the snow was up to our windowsills. And of all those people who had left, the multitudes, what had happened to them? They might as well have walked off the edge of a flat world .. . On the radios, or occasionally from the loudspeaker of an official car - which, seen from our windows, seemed like the relic of a dead epoch - came news from the east: yes, it seemed that there was life of a sort down there still. A few people even farmed, grew crops, made lives. ‘Down there’ - ‘out there’ - we did hear of these places, they were alive for us. And where we were was alive; the old city, near-empty as it was, held people, animals, and plants which grew and grew, taking over streets, pavements, the ground floors of buildings, forcing cracks in tarmac, racing up walls … life. When the spring came, what a burst of green life there would be, and the animals breeding and eating and flourishing.

But north and west, no. Nothing but cold and silence. We did not want to leave. And with whom? Emily, myself, and our beast - should we go by ourselves? There were no tribes leaving, no tribes even forming, and when we looked from our windows there was no one out there on the pavements. We were left in the cold dark of that interminable winter. Oh, it was so dark, it was such a low, thick dark. All around us, the black tall towers stood up out of the snow that heaped around their bases, higher every day. No lights in those buildings now, nothing; and if a window-pane glinted in the long black nights, then it was from the moon, exposed momentarily between one hurrying cloud and another.

One afternoon, about an hour before the light went, Emily was by the window looking out, and she exclaimed: ‘Oh no, no,
no
!’ I joined her, and saw Gerald out there on the deep, clean snow, high under stark branches. He wore his brave coat, but it was open, as if he did not care about the dreadful cold; he had nothing on his head, and he was moving about as if he were quite alone in the city and no one could see him. He was revisiting the scenes - so very recent, after all - of his triumphs, when he was lord of the pavement, chieftain of the gathering tribes? He looked about him at the exquisite crisp snow, up at the sky where low clouds were bringing dark inwards from the west, at the black trees touched up with white; he stood for minutes at a rime, quite passive, staring, in thought or in abstraction. And Emily watched, and I could feel the fever of her anxiety rising. By now the three of us were there, watching Gerald; and of course other people were at their windows watching too. He had no weapons. His ungloved hands were in his pockets, or hung at his sides. He looked quite indifferent, had disarmed himself and did not care.

Then a small object hurtled past him, like a speeding bird. He gave a rapid, indifferent glance at the building and stayed where he was. There followed a small shower of stones: from the windows above us catapults were being trained on him, perhaps worse than catapults. A stone hit his shoulder: it might have hit his face, or even an eye. Now he deliberately turned and faced the building, and we saw he was presenting himself as a target. He let his hands fall loose at his sides, and he stood quietly there, not smiling, but unworried, unalarmed, waiting, his eyes steadily on something or somebody in windows probably a storey up from us.

‘Oh
no
,’
said Emily again; and in a moment she had pulled around her shoulders a shawl, like a peasant woman, and she was out of the flat and I saw her running across the street. Hugo’s breath was coming in anxious little whines, and his nose was misting the windowpane. I put my hand on his neck and he quieted a little. Emily had slid her arm under Gerald’s, and was talking to him, coaxing him off that pavement and across the road towards us. There was a fusillade of stones, bits of metal, offal, rubbish. Blood appeared on Gerald’s temple, and a stone, landing in Emily’s middle, caused her to stagger back. Gerald, brought to life by the danger to her, now sheltered her with his arm, and he was bringing her into the building. Above I could hear the children shouting and calling out, and their chant: ‘I am the king of the castle …’ The stamping and chanting went on above us, as Gerald and Emily arrived in the room where Hugo and I waited for them. Gerald was white and there was a deep gash on his forehead, which Emily bathed and fussed over. And he made her look to see if the stone had hurt her much: there was a bruise, no worse.

Emily made him sit by the fire, and sat by him, and rubbed his hands between hers.

He was very low, depressed. ‘But they are just little kids,’ he said again, looking at Emily, at me, at Hugo. That’s all they are.’ His face was all incredulity and pain: I don’t know what it was in Gerald that could not - could not even now - bear what those children had become. I do know that it was deep in him, fundamental; and to give them up was to abandon - so he felt - the best part of himself.

TJo you know something, Era? - the little one, Denis, he’s four years old, yes, he is. Do you know him, do you know the one I mean? He was down here with me a few days back - the little one, with the cheeky face.’

‘Yes, I do remember, but Gerald, you do have to accept…’

‘
Four
,
he persisted, ‘four. That’s all. I worked it out from something he said. He was born the year the first lot of travellers came through this area. Yet he goes out with the 
others, he is as tough as the others. Did you know he was on that job - you know, the one that night?’

‘A murder?’ I asked, since Emily did not say anything, but went on rubbing his cold hands.

‘Yes, well - but it was murder, I suppose. He was there. When I came back that night, I lost my temper, I was as sick as I could be. I said to them … and then one of them said that Denis had done it, he was the first to let go with what he’d got - a stone, I think. He was the first, and then after him, the others - four years old. And when I came back into the flat, do you know, the dead man was there, and they were all … and Denis was there, as large as life among them, taking his part - it’s not their fault, how can it be their fault? How can you blame a kid of four?’