CHAPTER 35
10 years AC
Suffolk
Raymond’s present, as it happened, did make a difference. A huge difference.
She’d forgotten all about it as they got under way, sliding onto the saddles of their bikes and pedalling along the flat road south towards London. Heading through East Anglia, mercifully free of any steep inclines, just a long, straight and empty road, flanked on either side by untamed farmland that had gone to seed; fields of maize and rape that had quite happily propagated in partnership with the bees year on year without the need of any human husbandry or heavy duty machinery.
The trailer rolled obediently behind them on thick rubber tyres that crackled over ten years of wind-borne debris that had blown across the empty road; twigs, leaves, grit and gravel.
They stopped for a rest at midday, sweating from the warmth of the sun diffused by a thin veil of combed-out clouds. All of a sudden she had remembered Raymond’s present and found an HMV carrier bag in the back of the trailer. Inside she found an iPod and - very handy - a wind-up charger to go with it. There was a note with them.
Leona,
I filled it up with a load of stuff from my library. Sixty gigabytes of music. It’s fully charged, and the charger will sort you out thereafter. It’s not the greatest hand charger in the world - ten minutes of winding seems to give you about half a dozen songs’ worth of power.
Music got me through several years of being alone. There were quite a few days when I guess I also thought ‘why bother’ . . . and it was the heavier stuff, like Zeppelin and Metallica, played bloody loud, that got me off my arse.
Seriously, I hope this somehow makes you change your mind. The world will be a poorer place without you in it.
Raymond.
PS: Yes, I will take good care of her.
Leona screwed the note up and discreetly tossed it into a pile of rubbish and dried leaves that had pooled against the kerb of the hard shoulder. Glad Jacob hadn’t found the bag and read the note.
On the other side of the trailer the boys were both bitching about their saddle sores, Jacob nagging Nathan to swap because his saddle looked more padded.
She held the iPod in her hand, still smooth and unscratched, box-new in fact. Her thumb remembered how to switch it on. The small screen flickered, glowing weakly in the afternoon light. She stared down at the small screen in the palm of her hand, a menu that, once upon a time, had been so familiar to her. She must have scrolled up and down through it a million times back in the old world . . .
Music
Photos
Videos
Extras
Settings
Shuffle Songs
She imagined herself a nineteen-year-old degree student again. If her gaze could just remain within that two-inch backlit display she could pretend the world beyond it was as it once was; that the last ten years had been nothing more than a very lucid and very long dream. That it was an ordinary Monday morning once more, a lecture to get dressed for and hurry along to and not be late for, the bustle of other students around her in a shared kitchen, the hiss of a kettle, the tinkle of teaspoons in mugs, the radio blaring in the corner . . .
She held the iPod right up close to her face until the words blurred.
If I could just jump through the screen into the past.
‘Hey, Lee? What you got there?’
It was Jacob. The fantasy evaporated and she realised her cheeks were wet. She quickly rubbed them dry.
‘What is it, Lee?’
‘A gift from Raymond,’ she replied.
002
An hour later, back on their bikes coasting effortlessly down a gentle incline that seemed to have been going on for miles, she understood what Raymond had said in his note. Music pumping through the earphones, songs she half-remembered, favourites she’d never forgotten. A bit of rock music played deafeningly loud was as good a tonic as anything else.
On the flat horizon ahead of them she could see the grey outskirts of Cambridge and the late afternoon sun already beginning to make arrangements to settle for the night.
So should we.
Up ahead of them, off a slip road, was a short row of roadside terraced council houses, the front lawns littered with rotting rubbish and overgrown with grass gone to seed. Out front, a dozen cars, parked half on, half off the kerb were quietly rusting away, several of them blackened and twisted with fire damage from long ago.
A road sign informed them that Cambridge was five miles further up the road. It was as good a place as any to park up for the night. She pulled the earphones out and told the boys to steer up the slip road.
A few moments later, the bicycles braked with a hiss and skittering of dislodged gravel. They dismounted outside the row of houses and their cluttered overgrown front yards. Picking the emptiest garden they set about clearing some space, stamping down the tall grass and weeds and tossing aside enough of the garden toys tangled beneath to set down their tents and build a cooking fire between them. Leona sent Jacob into the nearest house to forage for firewood whilst she helped Nathan assemble the tents. She pulled a tub of their freeze-dried food out from beneath the trailer’s tarpaulin and measured enough out for the three of them, whistling as she did so.
Jacob stepped cautiously through the open front door, pushing it in with a creak of rusted hinges and the rattle of a loose glass panel nestled in a weather-warped frame. The dim interior beyond had once been a small front room; a flat-screen TV, the glass cracked in one corner, a fireplace. Above that was a school portrait of a boy in his uniform, hair cropped short on a bullet-shaped head and grinning mischievously. On the mantelpiece beside the photo sat an attendance certificate for Jamie Conner - Year 5 proudly framed. Jacob eased himself past a single sofa and an armchair, both rotting from damp and the rain that had blown in through the open door over the last ten winters.
He stepped across the lounge and into the kitchen and found a pine breakfast table and chairs that they could use for firewood. Several cheap kitchen units had rotted from their brackets and collapsed from the wall, spilling mismatched crockery and favourite tea-stained mugs across the counter and onto the linoleum-covered floor. A single weed grew proudly through the broken frosted glass of a back door leading onto a modest rear yard with a trampoline in it.
A narrow and steep stairway that creaked underfoot took him up to a bathroom and two other rooms with doors ajar. One was a boy’s bedroom wallpapered with a pattern of footballs and goalposts and peppered with Blu-Tacked glossy pullouts of Ronaldinho. Through the other door he saw the end of a double bed and the tented bumps of something beneath a fading quilt. He didn’t need to step forward to know what was in there. Jacob had seen this hundreds of times already over the years; the beds of families who had opted for the easy way out rather than fight to survive, beneath the faded quilt the pitiful twisted leather carcasses embracing each other, empty pill bottles on the bedside table.
He headed quickly back downstairs, content that the rotting kitchen units and the pine table and chairs were more than they needed to keep a fire going tonight. No need to come up and disturb young Jamie Conner and his parents again.
‘South,’ said Nathan looking at the others. ‘South from here. Right? That’ll take us down towards the Dartford Tunnel?’
Leona studied the scuffed road atlas by the flickering light of the campfire. She’d pulled it from the rack of a garage several days ago and already it looked thumbed enough to have belonged to a well-travelled sales rep. Flipping from one page to the next she muttered under her breath.
‘I never could read bloody road maps.’
Nathan sighed impatiently. ‘If we just head south, man, we’ll, like, hit the Thames, right? S’all we need to do.’
Leona shook her head. ‘Heading south from here won’t take us to London.’ Her finger brushed down the page from Bishops Stortford. ‘We’ll be going more towards the east of London and then we’ll have to turn right to head in along the Thames estuary. That’s a lot longer.’ She looked up at him and Jacob. ‘We should just follow the road into London. It takes us right into the centre. That’s far quicker.’
And Shepherd’s Bush would be a couple of hours from there. Nearly journey’s end.
Jacob frowned. ‘But we might miss the lights Mr Latoc saw . . . we might go past them.’
‘You told me he said the sky was glowing, Jake. Right?’
Jacob nodded.
‘Well, if he was telling the truth, then you’ll see them for miles. I’m sure we won’t miss them.’
‘He was crossing the river. He said he saw them to the east.’
‘Yeah, Jake, but where was he crossing?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘He just said it was somewhere near Big Ben.’
He looked down at the map, recognising the familiar blue loops of the Thames. ‘We should head down to the river and just follow it.’
She looked again at the map. ‘That means,’ she said running her finger across the page, ‘we’ll come off the M11 onto the M25 until the Dartford Tunnel . . .’
Nathan nodded. ‘S’right, then turn right an’ follow the river into London. Easy, man.’
‘We won’t get lost,’ said Jacob, ‘if we just follow the river.’
The idea of keeping to the Thames certainly felt a little more appealing than heading into the bowels of the city, which might still be - most probably was - a ghostly necropolis of dark and abandoned office blocks and shopping malls. To have the open river to their left would offer some reassurance. A less direct route though and it would probably add another day to their journey, given the sluggish pace they were making towing the heavy trailer behind them.
Another day won’t hurt, will it? She could hang on another day. She realised she wasn’t in quite the same hurry to get home and pop a bottle of pills as she had been a few days ago.
‘All right, then,’ she sighed and shared a quick conciliatory smile with the boys. ‘Along the river it is.’
Jacob placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey, maybe, if it’s not too far we could drop by our old home. See how it is.’
Leona wondered if Jacob was probing; had somehow sensed her resolve to go home for good. ‘I don’t think so. Best we leave Dad in peace, eh?’
He looked up at her. ‘I miss him.’
‘I know, but he’s not really there, Jake. It’s just a body now. Just like all the others.’
They’d seen the desiccated remains that had once been dads and sons, mums and daughters, still clad in football strips, jumpers, summer blouses and teen fashion tops. And Dad was going to look just the same; a dried husk in clothes stained a dark sepia.
‘All right,’ he said eventually.
She reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘Let’s just head towards Dartford and see if those lights are there somewhere along the Thames, eh? Just like Mr Latoc said.’
Both of them nodded.
She folded the page of the road map over and then snuggled down into her sleeping bag, watching the flames dance and sparks flutter into the night sky. She fell asleep listening to Jacob and Nathan discussing comic book superheroes.