CHAPTER 25
10 years AC
Outside Bracton, Norfolk
An hour later, they were on the A road out of Bracton on bicycles they’d pulled out of a toyshop, at just about the same moment Walter must have found the scribbled note Helen had sneaked back and placed in the yacht’s cockpit.
It was the only way Jacob could think she’d go, along the main road heading south-west, keeping herself to the middle of the road, and warily scanning the untidy gone-to-seed fields either side, the tall weeds and untamed bushes that threatened to encroach on the road from the crumbling hard shoulder.
He prayed she’d not been so lucky to find herself a bicycle to use, or if she had, that at least she wasn’t pedalling as hard as they were. He kept finding himself drawing ahead of the others, desperate to eat up the road ahead of him and find her.
Mid-morning he’d stopped yet again to wait for the others to catch up and to take a swig from a bottle of water in his shoulder bag, when he thought he saw some movement up ahead.
He squinted, trying to make sense of the uncertain distant dark outline on the road; something low and round. Glancing back he could see the other two, broaching a low hill, struggling to catch him up. He put the bottle back in his bag, lifted his feet off the road and cautiously rode a little closer until his useless long vision gave him something more to work with.
A wooden chair in the middle of the road and someone slumped on it, back to him.
Even from this far he recognised the slope of her shoulders. ‘Leona?’
She didn’t stir.
Please no . . . please no . . .
He pedalled furiously forward. ‘Leona!’ he whimpered, finally clattering to a halt a dozen yards away and tossing the bike down at his feet. ‘Leona?’ he called out again softly. ‘It’s me! Jake!’
This time he thought he detected the slightest movement.
He was taking the last steps toward her when she slowly turned to look round at him. ‘Hey,’ was all she said.
Jacob was about to reach out for her when he saw one hand resting in her lap, holding a knife, and on the wrist of her other arm the light and unsuccessful scoring of the blade; nicks and scratches that told of squeamish attempts at a decisive incision.
She laughed humourlessly. ‘You know me . . .’
He nodded.
‘Chuck my guts at the first sight of blood.’ She sighed and turned back to look at the road ahead, straight as a Roman highway. ‘I thought I’d just wait here a while.’
He knelt down in front of her; her eyes were over the top of his head and they remained on the flat horizon.
‘Lee,’ he whispered, reaching out for the knife in her lap. ‘Lee, can I have it?’
Her fingers tightened around the handle until her knuckles bulged white.
‘Lee?’ She was still far away. ‘Lee!’ Her eyes finally dropped down to look at him.
‘Sis,’ he squeezed her hand, ‘I . . . I need your help.’
She said nothing, but a lethargic curiosity made her cock an eyebrow.
‘I . . . my bike chain came off, Lee. Do you know how the shitting thing goes back on?’
She closed her eyes slowly and sighed. ‘Jesus, Jake. Can’t you do anything?’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘No.’
She eased her grasp on the knife and he gently took it from her. ‘Not without you, I can’t. I’m rubbish without you.’
‘Always a dork,’ she uttered, and pressed out a wan smile.
He grinned, tears on his cheeks. ‘And you were always a stroppy cow.’
‘I know.’
Jacob glanced back up the road. Nathan and Helen had stopped their bikes a hundred yards short; sensibly figuring they ought to hold back for the moment.
‘Lee, you were always the strong one. You were strong for me once, do you remember? Back in the house?’
She nodded.
Oh, yes . . . she remembered cowering in the darkness of their London home, the small suburban street outside dancing with the light of burning cars, several dozen kids drunk on what they’d looted from the off licence around the corner and on the end-of-the-world party atmosphere. For them it was the rave to end all raves. Fun and games. Looting and raping.
Then they’d decided to play treasure hunt and invade the homes one by one.
Leona still awoke at night reliving their desperate fight to keep the Bad Boys out of the house, hitting, swiping, scratching and biting through broken downstairs windows then finally running and hiding upstairs as they broke in through the barricaded front door. Hiding beneath the sink unit in the bedroom. Jacob, only eight then, trembling in her arms. They could hear the boys laughing, braying as they searched for their prize to rape, hunting for the ‘smurfette’ they knew was hiding somewhere inside.
We can sme-e-e-ell you-u-u-u-u . . . come out!
‘Me, Nathan and Helen, we’re going down to London.’
‘Oh.’
‘The lights have come on in London.’
She frowned. ‘What?’
‘Mr Latoc said he saw them . . . from a long way off. A big glow over the Thames.’
Leona stirred in the chair. ‘He said that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Across London?’
She missed the hesitation in his reply. ‘All along it, all over, that’s what he said.’
Some sense of possibility tingled inside her. An alternative to sitting here in the middle of the road until she could muster enough willpower to push that stupid blunt tip all the way into her wrist.
An alternative.
‘They’ve been rebuilding quietly,’ continued Jacob. ‘Nathan reckons they wouldn’t be radioing out and telling everyone that they’re rebuilding things ’cause it might draw too many people at once. Swamp them, you know?’
Hannah loved the stories you told her of the past, didn’t she? She loved the idea of shopping malls, ten-pin bowling, IMAX cinemas, fun fairs . . .
‘That’s why we haven’t heard about it on the radios,’ Jacob continued. ‘It’s a secret. They’ve been doing it bit by bit. Otherwise there’d be people coming across from other countries too, probably.’
. . . she liked the idea of Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero, all glittering lights and neon signs; ice-skating at Queens and then a pizza afterwards; disco dancing to naff Abba songs till the early hours and then Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for breakfast.
‘It’s one of those safe zones, I reckon, Lee. One of them that’s come to life after all this time, and now it’s rebuilding the city. It’s remaking our home.’
Home. Hannah wants you to find home. The fairytale home, real home; not those five rusting platforms in the middle of the North Sea.
‘What about Mum?’
Jacob was quiet for a few moments. ‘Dr Gupta reckons she’ll pull through. She’s strong. We left a note. Telling them we’re going to see what’s happening in London. Then we’ll come back.’
She could hear a lot more pain and conflict in his voice than he was prepared to own up to. As for herself, right now, Leona felt nothing for Mum but a dim sense of regret, clouded by blame and anger; some of it deserved, most of it not. Every ounce of grief she’d cried out in the last few days had been for Hannah. But then this kind of pain mostly flowed that way, didn’t it? Downwards - mother to child. Mum knew that, she’d understand.
‘If it’s all getting fixed up, we can come back and get everyone to join us and return to London. How cool would that be?’
Leona nodded.
‘Just a scouting trip,’ he added. ‘That’s all. We’re going to go find out and report back.’
London. Home.
Perhaps there’d be a chance to revisit their abandoned house in Shepherd’s Bush. To lie on her old bed once more, look at the faded posters on her pink walls. And if this glistening promise of lights turned out to be an empty promise, a mirage that came to nothing, then she could think of far worse places to come to a fitting end than in her childhood room, snug beneath her quilt, and Dad - Andy Sutherland, oil engineer, father, husband - lying still in the next bedroom, undisturbed these last ten years.
Going home.
‘Can I come along with you?’ she found herself asking.
Jacob hugged her clumsily. He was always clumsy, her little brother. He mumbled something into her shoulder. She stretched an arm out and hugged him tightly. Not just a sparrow-chested little dork any more, but a young man with broad shoulders. He was big enough that they could look after each other now.
‘Thank you, Jake,’ she whispered, planting a kiss on his head amidst the tousled hair.
‘So,’ he replied, letting her go and swiping at his face with the back of his hand, ‘we need to find you a bike and stuff.’