Wake (15 page)

The body's helmeted head had made a round dent in the roof, but the back of the helmet was flattened. The man's cheeks and jaw looked as if they had been carefully cut away from his skull and spread out, like a circle of raw dough. The mask of the helmet was still in place across the eyes and nose, but the eyes were pushed out of their sockets and pressed against the goggles like pickled eggs in a jar.

Because the corpse was that of a military man, Dan had fetched Bub while William was fetching Theresa.

Bub said that it looked as if the man had made a high-altitude parachute jump. ‘His parachute would have one of those devices that allow a chute to deploy only when it reaches the right altitude—like the parachutes on a fighter pilot's ejection seat.'

‘But it didn't deploy,' William said. ‘The man wasn't conscious. And the mechanism didn't work.'

‘Because it's a mechanism, I guess,' Bub said. ‘And the No-Go is hostile to them.'

‘How do those things work? The parachute devices?'

‘I think they're triggered by changes in air pressure.'

‘Does that mean the No-Go is tens of thousands of feet high?' William asked. Then, ‘You know, we thought we heard two or three distinct sounds. This guy won't have been alone.'

‘The others might have landed inside the No-Go,' Bub said.

Theresa said, ‘Or we might yet find them.'

‘Shouldn't we look through his clothes for information?' Dan asked. ‘There might be a message saying what they're up to—the people out there. What they know about what happened, and how they plan to help us.' He sounded desperately eager.

‘I'll search him,' Bub volunteered. He tried to prise the military man's shoulder out of the folded roofing steel. The man had a gun under him, but it was bent out of shape.

The man had identity tags. He had a name. A name, a knife, a gun, a first-aid kit, two flashlights, one normal and one with a light so bright it was hot and impossible to look at.

‘What's that for? Starting fires?' William said.

‘It's for signalling, I think,' said Bub. He switched the torch on and aimed it out at the bay.

‘At night,' said William.

‘Yes,' Bub said, then switched the torch off again. He sighed. ‘When I went into the army they'd stopped teaching signallers Morse.'

‘Were you in the Signal Corps?' Theresa asked.

‘No. Armoured Corps. A LAV unit,' Bub said. Then, ‘I'll do some meaningless flashing tonight. Just to remind them we're here.'

*

Curtis had plugged his digital video camera into a computer in the manager's office, and was reviewing footage. He'd been filming some of what went on day-to-day: Bub and Belle standing on a street banging spoons against tins of pet food till the cats came running; Jacob changing Sam's dressing; Warren ploughing up and down the pool, after dark, when little wisps of steam came off the heated water; and the shimmering stillness of the town at morning, every morning.

Curtis was a documentary filmmaker. When he'd picked up his camera he was reverting to the habit of a lifetime in order to find his way forward. But he was having trouble imagining himself, even a year later, looking this over and finding anything that made sense, or was worth seeing.

William came in and stood watching over Curtis's shoulder. They'd got to Curtis's long shots of bodies lying in the street. Of Theresa and Jacob searching them for identification, then draping them with sheets. Curtis said, ‘All this is problematic. I have to consider the feelings of relatives, then weigh them against the idea of having some direct evidence.'

William said, ‘And I've been mentally composing opening arguments for someone prosecuting the case in which those relatives are the plaintiffs. My arguments are all about the carelessness and callousness of corporations. With references to Bhopal and Union Carbide.'

Curtis's years of documentary-making had inclined him to just listen to people and let them run on. He swivelled his chair and looked at William—his bruised eye sockets, his very clear eyes.

‘But making a case is just a habit for me.' William nodded at the images on screen. ‘And so is your thinking about what you should and shouldn't film.'

‘So you're not going with the nerve gas theory?'

‘How could something like that be so selective? How could it drive people mad but not animals?'

‘Theresa keeps telling us to put all that aside for now,' Curtis said. ‘She's right.'

‘She's right to get us to focus on the things we can do. But I'm not sure that's all we should be considering. You're a
thinker
, Curtis. I need you to think.'

Curtis had begun to feel that his habit of facing life with a camera in front of his eyes was a curse. He'd lost his wife of thirty-eight years, and here he was still filming things, and being wooed by the group's leader for his moral qualities, and by its maverick for his imagination. But Curtis didn't want to be reminded of his worth. He wanted to go on being the man he was in Adele's eyes. He wanted to be left in peace to think only about Adele. He said, ‘If you're trying to enlist me into pushing Theresa to discuss things, don't bother. I don't want to be a part of any of this. Part of the group or the group's decisions.' Then, ‘Excuse me,' he said, and left the manager's office.

He went and sat on the leather sofa in the atrium, where Oscar was sitting, grimly hanging on to his controller and glaring at the big plasma TV. ‘Hi, Mr Haines,' said Oscar, then, explanatory, ‘The red line is my health. I'm taking too many hits.'

The following day, Theresa, Bub, and Curtis went to the supermarket. Theresa asked them to stock up on things they needed in order to tackle Mary Whitaker. She grabbed a shopping trolley and went to the start of the toiletries aisle. ‘I'll fill this with hand sanitiser.'

Bub said, ‘I'll collect rubbish sacks and packing tape.'

‘And rubber gloves. And twine, if there is any.'

Bub wrestled the trolley out of the cue, and went off pushing it with his belly.

Theresa looked at Curtis. His eyes were red-rimmed. His skin seemed thin and bluish in the light of the fluorescents. ‘I know I can trust you to judge what we will and won't need right now,' she said.

He grabbed a trolley and set off down the aisle.

Ten minutes later Theresa ran into him again between the canned fruit and breakfast cereals and, glancing into his basket, saw that it was full of single-serve food products. She nosed her trolley up to his. He was peering over the top of his glasses, reading the fine print on a small tin of tuna. He tossed it in, and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

‘What are you doing, Curtis?'

He regarded her, his expression strained. ‘I think it would be better for me to be on my own.'

Theresa opened her mouth, but stopped when he held up his hand. ‘Hear me out. I can't be with strangers right now, Theresa. It's harder than being alone.'

‘Has someone been disrespectful?'

‘No, not at all.'

‘We want to look after you,' Theresa said. ‘And if you go off alone I can't guarantee your safety.'

‘Bub might be obediently filling his trolley with rubbish sacks and rubber gloves, but don't you see that you can't keep asking people to handle corpses?'

‘We only have to make a start,' Theresa said. ‘Of course police and coroners are going to come along after us. And I know that even making a start will be a hard, horrible task. But we have to, for sanitary reasons, never mind anything else. Obviously I'm going to exempt Oscar and Kate. Oscar's too young and Kate's over eighty and kind of off-duty.'

Curtis said, ‘If you start, where will you stop?'

‘There are satellites watching us right now. The people monitoring them have to see hostages, not hostage-takers. They have to see survivors, not perpetrators.'

‘Sanitary reasons I understand. But you can't get people to dig mass graves because you're worried about a bunch of remote and invisible watchers, and what they're thinking.'

Theresa heard Curtis concede the sanitation point. She decided his concession was a lever, and leaned on it. ‘I wouldn't ask you to do anything more than photograph bodies for later identification.'

‘No. Listen. You have to know that you're not representative. You're a very tough person.'

‘But you've been
filming
stuff.'

‘And I've discovered that I don't want to.'

Theresa looked across their kissing shopping trolleys, and the different declarations of their contents. Her heart was pounding. ‘This is just a difference of opinion,' she said. ‘You're over-thinking everything.'

‘You're the one who's imagining she's being watched and judged,' said Curtis. He turned his trolley and went on hard-headedly gathering his meals for one.

That evening, when dinner was over, Theresa explained to the others that Curtis had decided to leave them. She emphasised what he'd said about missing his wife more when he was with people. She tried not to let on that she felt she'd failed him.

Belle touched Theresa's arm and said, ‘I guess that's where he is right now in the process.'

‘Where is he now?' Sam asked.

Belle looked baffled.

‘Belle means where he is in the grieving process,' Bub said, helpful.

‘I think Sam's asking where Curtis actually is,' said Theresa. Then, to Sam, ‘He's been to the garden centre, and he's out there in the dark planting petunias on his wife's grave. I wouldn't bother him. I think it's a private ceremony.'

*

‘What do you want, William?' Curtis said. He was working in the light of Bub's big storm lamp. It was drizzling, and the soil was cold.

William unfurled an umbrella and held it up over him. ‘Are those petunias?'

‘Yes. Why?'

‘I'm surprised Theresa knew what they were. The model and make of cars maybe—but flower names, not so much.'

Curtis grunted. He pinched a cell in the tray of seedlings and extracted another plant. Its roots resisted and tore. He said, ‘I trust you're going to support her. Theresa has a hard row to hoe.'

William crouched. He kept the umbrella positioned above Curtis's head. ‘If the madness was a disease and you were asked to make a list of its symptoms, how would that list go?'

‘Okay, you tell me. What's your list?'

‘One—' William began, ‘it switched on all of a sudden and—two—seemed to communicate itself to everyone simultaneously, except—three—all of us, excluding Sam. Four—it went on for forty minutes to an hour. Five—it had an end stage, that passive going-away period just before each of its victims died. That's what we know about it.'

‘But we don't know what caused it.'

‘No. But I know a bit about insanity. And the insanity I've known has had a kind of logic to it, as if the crazy person's only problem is one of perspective, or a sense of proportion. For instance, a woman I knew used to say that her roof was leaking but that it wasn't rain that was coming in. She'd climbed up into her roof to look at the holes rusted in its iron and, while she was up there, she noticed a lot of pipes that seemed to have no purpose. So she decided that of course someone had put them there. And though liquid ran down the walls either when it was raining or shortly after, it was
obvious
that it wasn't rain, it was from these pipes and it wasn't water, it was something else, something sinister and bad for her family's health, worse for their health than a leaking roof.

‘What's going on there, with that madness, is that the woman had built a logical scheme of thinking based on a false premise. Her premise being that everything was about
her
. There was no point asking her why anyone would go to so much trouble with a rundown house, and impoverished occupants, to put pipes between roof and ceiling to periodically release some mysterious liquid. “Why would someone take the trouble to do that to you?” wasn't a meaningful question. Crazy people can't consider probability. Of course everything is about them. They are a constant—and it's the world that has changed. They're in the know—and everyone else is in the dark.

‘Most mental illness is like that. There are problems with a sense of proportion. And it's
internal
. The way in which the Madness was different, apart from its coming on all at once, was that the logic of some of it was like something imposed from the outside. As if there was someone overseeing what happened. Someone saying, “Okay, this woman is a shopkeeper. Shopkeepers take money from customers in exchange for goods, and the money puts bread in their mouths. But this shopkeeper is going to give her customer money, is going to
feed
her money, post each coin between her lips until she chokes.” That's a total mad reversal of the normal relationship between shopkeeper and customer.' William paused and said, ‘Sorry, Curtis.' He clenched his teeth, and a muscle rippled in his jaw.

‘That's all right,' Curtis said. ‘Please go on.'

‘My point is that it was as if some intelligence examined the normal relationships between people—including fairly superficial, social relationships—then did something to flip them. The Madness worked completely differently from the way madness normally does. And, contrary to popular belief, madness has a kind of normal in it. The only real mystery in madness is how hard it is to fix, and the usual, ordinary mystery of where people go when they disappear while still standing in front of you.'

Curtis sat back on his heels and looked up at William. ‘You said “some intelligence examined”. That implies a point of view, an agent of evil, not just psychosis-inducing nerve gas.'

‘A narcotic that caused psychosis would produce behaviour that was distorted, but characteristic. The mad acts would come out of private fears or anger. But with some of what we saw it was like the
public
person went mad—the person seen from the outside, as if by some evil puppeteer.'