Thimblewinter (4 page)

That day had been a rest day for all of us, it being a Sunday and by tradition there being no market, but the next day found Cal and the Constable and Mrs. Sharma all ready to go on with what we were here to do.

I had come downstairs early to find them, Cal and the Constable, in Richards’ room, where he was showing them something through a telescope he had set up in one of the bay windows. I stood in the doorway, but they took no notice of me, too tied up in their talking. I realised as I listened that some time the evening before they must have told Richards why we were really here, which surprised me and sent a little chill of fear down my body.

He was telling them where they might hire soldiers, fighting men.

“Don’t try anything in the town,” he was saying, “the militia have all the security work and the like sewn up. If they even think you’re trying to hire people, they’ll look on it as a threat to them. And besides, it’s forbidden by the Council”.

He motioned the Constable towards the telescope, which was pointed out towards the lighthouse at the end of the bay.

“One family control the lighthouse and the Council pays them to maintain the light. There’s an old village along the coast before you get to the point, what’s left of it anyway, once a sort of holiday resort.”

Cal and the Constable seemed to understand what he meant, though I was unsure of it.

“The village and lighthouse are not under town control, so the sort of men you are looking for are likely to be found in the pubs and bars of that place”.

The picture he conjured up was, to me, that of a pirate, town; a place of freebooters and buccaneers. I could not but help picturing them in their stolen finery, with cutlasses and cut-throat smiles. But soon I was led by my hunger down the stairs to the kitchen, where I was again fed by Nes, who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time there.

I thought this had perhaps been what her life had been like in Africa, because she had let slip that that was where she was from, and I reckoned that she had spent her time in a village like mine, only made of mud and thatch. But when I told her this, she corrected me. She had come from a city not unlike this one and she laughed at my idea of some village life, but after that she said no more. Later Mrs. Sharma came in and told me to get ready, we were to visit her family and Nes would be our guide.

The morning that we stepped into was bright and brassy and even these streets outside the town walls had a bustle and flurry about them. Nes had told us that we must be careful, though, and she checked the street carefully before she let us out of the house gates.

All the life on these streets seemed to happen outside the houses and there were numbers of people, all of differing ways and manners, crossing our paths or encountering us as we passed by. There were traders or craftsmen, cobblers and the like, who nodded to Nes as she passed and there were mothers and children sitting on their front steps, wary and shy, both child and adult. There were drunks too, even at this time of the day and we passed a knot of men who were arguing and seemed on the brink of fighting. She hurried us past these.

“You have to be careful of the gangs,” she said.

The area that we were going to was past the market place and over a rusting iron bridge that crossed the river, though this oily strip of dark, rubbish-strewn water seemed far different from the clear, fast waterway we had crossed some days before, up-valley. The bridge itself was a trial, as much of the wooden planking that had formed its roadway was rotten or of questionable strength. When I remarked on this, Nes laughed and strode on rapidly across, Mrs. Sharma and I following with a less sure step.

“A few years ago,” she said, as she waited for us to catch up on the other side, “the whole thing collapsed, leaving just the metal frame and the bridge supports. The Council did replace it, but grudgingly and with poor timber, so inevitably it will collapse again”.

She smiled at the discomforted look on both our faces.

“But hopefully it won’t happen when we’re crossing back.”

The place we were heading for was at the edge of a tarmac plain that had once been the dockyard, or so Nes told us, and bore the traces and skeletal  remains of the buildings that had previously stood there and the debris left after the looting and destruction of the hunger years. It was a strange desert this, designed by man, and it had an eerie quality, which made us uneasy.

We could just make out the merest flicker of movement in the shadows of the ruins, on the edge of sight and in the corner of the eye. We heard things too, a low rumble like speech, cries that could be animal or other. I took these to be the signs of rats and scavengers and Nes said they were there, all around us, but not all of them were animal and it was best not to be caught out in darkness here.

We passed through a denser belt of ruins and other obstacles, rotten palates stacked high, the rusting hulks of dock cranes and burnt out lorries, but then we came to a flat, cleared area and at the end of this, perched on the edge of the dock, was a compound. A chain-link fence topped with rolls of sharp-edged wire enclosed a series of buildings.

This was where Mrs. Sharma’s people were supposed to be, but if she had expected a welcome, there was scant sign of it. Instead a voice called us to a halt well before the gate and we had to identify ourselves before we were allowed to approach. And Mrs. Sharma did her best, though her voice was thin and blown away by fear both for us and because of the doubt she felt. A group of young brown-faced men emerged from a fortified guard house and opened a steel gate. I noticed they had soldier weapons, remembered what Cal had said, and wondered how many bullets they had in their guns.

Inside the fence, the buildings formed a rough rectangle and any passages and alleyways were blocked up and the walls loop-holed, so it seemed like a fortress. But when we passed into the inner courtyard of the place, I saw that it also served as a village with children and families all around and a vast open air kitchen under canvas constantly cooking food for the people.

The young men treated us well, but with some degree of suspicion, and we were left for some minutes under guard sitting at a table beneath the kitchen awning. While we waited a young woman brought us tea, black and sweet, and some biscuits. I noticed that she was wearing a scarf that covered her hair and under her coat I could see the edges of a loose tunic and full trousers.

Sometime later two of the young men came back and motioned for us to follow. They seemed more relaxed now and their weapons were slung on their shoulders. We followed them up an outside staircase to what had once been an office and still seemed to serve such a purpose, though there were children here too and in one corner two old women seemed deep in conversation.

We were led to an inner room and told to sit down and wait. One of the young men stayed just outside the door to keep an eye on us, I supposed, though he was deep in conversation with someone out of our line of sight. We did not have to wait long, for soon a rather stocky, middle-aged man appeared and took a seat opposite us. He greeted us by using some words I could neither catch nor understand, but Mrs. Sharma returned a similar greeting. Straight away he said, looking directly at Mrs. Sharma:

“You asked my men about your family. I’m afraid they are no longer here.”

I could not help looking at Mrs. Sharma, expecting her to react in some way, but except for a slight tremor of her mouth she kept still.

The man, who was called Mr. Ali, had more to say and over the course of the next hour or so we found out many things, not all of them pleasing. He said that he had known Mrs. Sharma’s brother and the family, but they had moved on some years back. I could not affect to understand everything that he said, but some of the things that were beyond my knowledge I would grow to understand later. 

When the Council was first formed, he said, they had used the laws that they enforced to take property and goods off people for what they called the common good. Mrs. Sharma’s brother and his family, and many other merchants and traders, had opposed this and had, at first, clashed with the militia, then thought better of it. The result had been an exodus of the Sharmas and others, taking what portable goods and wealth they could with them. They had sailed in a small flotilla of boats of various shapes and sizes across the channel.

“I can’t tell you where they are or how they are, but they are probably in one of the Devon villages. People say things are better there; there’s a federation of towns growing. We have a lot of contact with traders there, but of the Sharmas I can tell you little more.”

I thought that would be the end of our meeting, but, as these things do seem to go, the conversation went on and I was aware, even through the cloud of distraction and boredom I was starting to feel, that Mrs. Sharma and Mr. Ali were like two people fencing, using words to feint and parry, avoiding the kernel, the crux of why we were there. Mr. Ali struck the target first and quietly said:

“If you’ve come here to trade, that’s what we do.”

I don’t know who first mentioned weapons, I think perhaps that was Mrs. Sharma’s strike, finding out how far the trade extended. So Mr. Ali told us:

“We do have “soldier” weapons as you call them, automatic rifles and ammunition, but they will cost you”.

They fenced onward, during a lunch of some spicy sauce and more flat bread and grilled meat, but I did manage to learn that this trade was not allowed by the Council and that we had to be discreet. By this time Mr. Ali had learnt what we had to pay with and that seemed acceptable to him. The upshot was that we found ourselves at last in a dark corner of a warehouse with two young men forcing the lid off a packing case.

Mrs. Sharma had wanted to leave me out of this, fearing I suppose for any stratagems or a souring of the deal, but I shamelessly clung to her in mock fear and I was taken along. I think Mrs. Sharma had wanted to postpone this end of the business until Cal or the Constable were at hand, but as it turned out Nes was adept enough at things. And when the lid came off the case and the dull, oiled metal was revealed, it was Nes who checked the merchandise.

“AK47,” she said, “you don’t see many of these around anymore.”

She showed some skill in putting the gun together, a different side of her I had not seen before and which frightened me somewhat.

“That’s because those who have them, keep them near,” Mr. Ali replied.

“As I said to you before, if you’ve come to trade, that’s what we do.”

We were given an escort back, as we retraced our steps in the late afternoon. Nes had initially dismissed the offer of one, but Mr. Ali had insisted. A date for the trade had been set for two days hence. The order had been for six rifles and ammunition, which would be fabulously expensive, but Mrs. Sharma had reckoned that we had enough to cover it in precious metal and jewels. The actual amount involved in the trade would be hard to measure, but that would be for Cal and the Constable to figure.

As we walked back over the bridge and into the orbit of the town and its supposed security, I wondered at some of the things we had heard that day. That ships were still sailing the seas; that, though governments and nations had fallen, people were still connected by these invisible threads of trade and barter that had, anyway, come before nations. That things were passed from hand to hand still, through the enclaves and patchwork of towns and territories, which yet hung on with a tenacious stubbornness.

But then I saw the orange globe of the sun climbing down a red-tinged sky and I knew I had never seen such a sunset before and never in the mountains had I seen that golden road that lay on the surface of the ocean, pointing a hand, a finger, towards that world that was out there. And I yearned for it and I mourned for what I’d never see, from the equator’s jungles to the polar ice; if these things were still out there, if they still existed.

Then Nes took my hand and I started to forget these things, as she talked of the supper she was going to cook me.

Though the supper that Nes cooked was good, my mind was too uneasy, my thoughts drifting far away, to really savour it. It was all because the Constable and Cal had not yet returned and I was conjuring up all sorts of terrors and dangers that might overwhelm them. It was not as if they were overdue; they had told Richards that if they couldn’t finish the business that they were about in one day, they might well stay over in the sea town, if they could find a safe place. So no-one else was worried, or at least showed it, but me.

I did not think of the dangers that faced my village then, I just thought of myself in this strange house, in this frightening city, with Mrs. Sharma, an old woman, the only person I could really rely on. I did not know enough about Richards to really trust him and Nes… Well, Nes was Nes, and though she was warm and close to me, there was also a wildness about her, a ferocity even, that made me still uneasy around her.

That night I did not sleep well and in the hours before dawn I heard gunfire and a woman screaming and couldn’t settle afterwards. No-one else woke, as, after all, these were the normal noises of the city at night. The next day I was listless; Nes helped run the market stall, which was a good thing as I was of no use, and Mrs. Sharma had become quiet and withdrawn in herself since hearing about her family.

I had never really thought of her as old before these days, but now I saw that this bad news had taken something from her. As our teacher she had always seemed ageless, governed by time in a different way to other people, but now she looked worn and somehow deflated, as if she’d lost some spark of life that had driven her on up until now. But my burden at least was lifted later, as, when we returned home, Cal and the Constable were there, tired and looking somewhat troubled, but otherwise sound. Then we talked, all in the kitchen again, until night crept upon us.

Even in those days, apparently, it was not easy to go out and employ warriors - Richards called them mercenaries - to fight your battles for you; especially if those battles were up-country and somewhat unrewarding. Or so the Constable said, as he told us their story. They had decided to go on foot, not wanting to risk the Land Rover or its cargo. They had no problems leaving the city, though a small consideration was always expected in any dealings with the watch. A rather cheery militia man had waved them through the barricade and told them to watch that they didn’t get their throats cut. This seemed to amuse the other guards on duty.

The coast road was well-travelled and well-policed, as it was the city’s link to the light-house and keeping that light fed and alive counted for much with the Council. There were even some farms, the Constable said, behind the dunes that were encroaching on the road and the sea front, where once there had been a promenade and public parks.

The farms were away from the coast, north of the road on the gentle hills that had once been suburbs - according to Richards again - and were interposed in clear areas between heaps of rubble and rubbish dumps. People generally kept away from these ruins and dumps, because in the days of the flu so many had died that some of these places had served as mass graves.

Richards had told me that flu was just a word people used for a lot of diseases and other things that had killed people, including hunger and cold. But like a lot of things Richards said, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I found his knowledge of such matters made me almost angry; there were things I’d rather not have known, rather not have had explained. Now, after all these years, I regret this a little and wish I had listened to him more. A little, as I say, but not that much.

Cal and the Constable’s foretaste of the kind of place the sea town was happened some way along the road, where the coastal strip narrowed. As they had walked along the coast road they had seen ahead of them a tractor pulling two trailers of reclaimed timber that had been harvested from some of the dumps and ruin sites. It was a dirty and sometimes dangerous task, all sorts of noxious substances were present in those places, but the rewards were high as timber for building was scarce here.

The tractor was not only noisy, but was obviously running on some sort of second-hand vegetable oil, which left a stink of ancient cooked food in its wake. They had almost caught up to it and, as the way narrowed even further where the hills rose up and the coast cut in, they could clearly see the driver, shrouded in a heavy coat, his breath steaming. Suddenly they heard the loud, flat report of a home-made shotgun and saw a number of bolts or arrows glance off the face of the tractor cab. Some came their way too, so they took to the ditch, thankfully dry, and tried to work their way forward to where they could see clearly. The driver had jumped off or been knocked off the cab, and though they feared for his safety, he soon showed himself to be alive by returning fire with a rather antique-looking revolver.

They stayed where they were, afraid to work their way forward in case the driver thought they were of the attacker’s party and opened up on them, but Cal, sensing movement in the scrub opposite their position, let off a couple of blasts from his own shotgun into the bushes. He had little hope of hitting anything at that distance with the sawn-off, but he did it more to discourage than to maim.

Whatever his intention, the result was that the attack was broken off, due also to the fact that a party of militia were coming up the road from the sea town. When the dust and smoke had settled, they climbed out of the ditch and made their way down to where the driver was standing brushing the dirt off his coat. As they came up, he gave them a quizzical look and said:

“Thanks for your help, intended or not.” He nodded towards the trees and the militia men, who were, none too enthusiastically advancing into the undergrowth. “The remittance men will be long gone by now.”

The driver’s name was Owen, though they didn’t find out if this was his first or last name. He let them ride on the cab for the few miles of road that were left and took it on himself to tell them all of his woes and misfortunes.

He had a low opinion of the militia, mainly due to the fact that this was his regular run, hauling firewood to the lighthouse and its small garrison of guards, and he was supposed to have an escort. But he said they were always too lazy or too disorganised to turn up on time, so he often rode the way alone. The remittance men, he told them, were bands of robbers who occasionally preyed on the road.

“They get in and out fast,” he said, “and no one’s going to pursue them out into the country.” He swept his arm outwards in a vague gesture indicating the rolling hills, which seem to stretch away without roads or buildings into the distance.

“Though I suspect,” he went on, “that some come from nearer at hand.”

The road took a new shape as they got closer to the town. On one side a crumbling sea wall gave way to an expanse of flat, muddy sand. On the other side were dilapidated houses, once hotels and holiday flats, now either derelict or occupied by impoverished squatters. The sea-town, when they entered it, was something of a disappointment. There was a gate of sorts, but just a sleepy watchman before a fire keeping a desultory guard.

“Everyone’s welcome here,” Owen said, “they don’t keep anybody out.” He seemed to think this was funny.

Later, though, they saw how different the place was, when Owen took them to a tavern to buy them a drink. The place was low roofed and poky, it looked to have once been a cellar of a house, but now stood alone, close by the sea front, without its upper storeys. The customers were mainly seamen or fishermen and looked suspiciously at them as they walked in. But everyone seemed to know Owen and, somewhat grudgingly, eyes were eventually turned away from them and the barman, an elderly sort with a bad chest, served them rot-gut cider and wheezed out some words which approximated a greeting.

As they drank the cider and choked on the smoke from the fire place, which seemed to fill the room, they suddenly became aware of a disturbance outside in the small square that the place backed onto. Drinkers were pressing up against the narrow windows and spilling out onto the street. Inevitably, prompted by Owen, they ended up there too.

In the middle of the square a young woman was kneeling, though her head was covered by a shawl it was obvious that she was distraught. Owen nodded and grunted, as if this was of the general run of things there. Some other women had emerged now and seemed intent on dragging the girl away, but she wouldn’t be moved and squirmed away as they tried to drag her off. There now seemed to be an almost carnival atmosphere about the square and Owen took it on himself to give them an explanation of the way of things.

“That girl there,” he said, “is Maddy Owen, but she is no relation of mine. Or perhaps just a distant cousin. Her man got into trouble with the O’Briens, who run the lower part of town, or at least run the rackets there, and they shot him. He’s in the old Rummer Tavern,” he indicated a building across the square, a grander place to the one they were in, “but they won’t give up the body to her. They are going to treat him like the dog he is - that’s what they said not me - and put him out on the rubbish cart when it comes around.”

He sighed and went on:

  “She has been waiting disconsolate for hours, but now has started kicking up a fuss. And if they are not quick about getting her away,” he indicated with a nod of his head the women, who were trying to help her, “she’ll get shot too.”

“Can no-one do anything?” The Constable asked, but Owen shook his head in befuddlement.

“No. She has no family to stand up for her and there’s no law here. She’s just a poor girl”.

There was now some movement from the Rummer Tavern; a man had emerged, looking much the worse from drink. He was carrying a hunting rifle of some sort, Cal couldn’t make out the type, and he started unsteadily towards the girl. The women with her were obviously panicked, but would not move away. One started to scream and sank down beside the girl. The man, a young man with long red hair tied back, advanced on her, bringing up the rifle, muttering something about bitches.

Some others had come out of the Rummer Tavern now, two armed men who had a similar look to the red-haired man, brothers perhaps, and some others who looked to be hangers-on. They whistled and jeered and seemed to be egging the man on.

“That’s Kieron O’Brien,” Owen muttered, almost under his breath, “she’s in for it now.”

Afterwards the Constable told me that he had held his breath at that moment, fearing that he would see the girl executed there in the square in front of him. He told me that he had wondered whether he would just turn away, as he was sure the others would do, or shout out his outrage, however useless that would be. But as he watched he became conscious of a man, in an old military fatigue jacket, who was moving slowly along the front of the crowd.

He thought nothing of it, until he saw the man stop and, glancing towards the others in front of the tavern, take a few steps forward, coming up behind Kieron O’Brien. What happened next was confused and unclear. Suddenly Kieron was on his knees, the rifle wrenched out of his arms by the man, who pivoted around and used it to cover the two other O’Briens outside the tavern.

Their reactions were slowed by drink and before they had time to level their weapons, two other figures had stepped from the crowd on either side of them and had them covered with weapons. They then thought better of the encounter, but Kieron had now rolled onto his back and was reaching for the automatic at his belt. A couple of taps from the butt end of his own rifle quieted him, though.

The hangers-on were pressed into service to retrieve the lover’s body, while the three O’Briens were temporarily locked in a shed. The three strangers, all the Constable noted in various bits of old military uniform and with soldier guns, waited to see the funeral procession on its way, for that is what the crowd had now turned into, and then faded away as quickly as they had come. By this time the Constable had already decided he had found three of his men, though Cal was not so sure.

“They looked like old soldiers,” he said,” and old soldiers are always trouble.”

It had taken some asking, and much of Owen’s capacity to help, to find out more about these soldiers. Owen, it seemed, had little pressing to do after he had delivered his cargo of wood and seemed happy to be distracted from his journey home. It took time too, so it wasn’t until the evening, and late on at that, that the Constable had found himself on the overgrown drive of the house where the soldiers were reputed to be camped.

He was frank with us as he told this part of the story, said how he cursed himself for being so stupid as he walked on the gravel pathway towards the ruined building. He had left Cal to trawl the bars and the taverns of the sea-town, in the hope of finding more gunmen. So he felt alone now and more than lonely, filled with the fear that his hope for this, his mission, was forlorn and that, after all, it was a fool’s errand. To think that he, a grey- bearded old man, could deal and deliver in this murky world of violence and death. But he knew, at heart, there was no alternative, that in failing he would fail the whole village.

I must own that this was all a surprise to me, as I had never thought of our Constable as being someone who felt fear and other feelings as we all did. But he had steeled himself to the task, his hand on the butt of the revolver in his pocket, for which, I knew, he had only five cartridges and these somewhat old.

It had, he told us, been an anti-climax. He had walked out of the shadows into the light of a fire, which had been lit in front of the gutted porch of the old house, and where the man he recognised from earlier, the one who had disarmed Kieron O’Brien, was sitting in what had once been an expensive antique armchair.