One Crow Alone Page 11

  Ivan turned his head toward her. Dim clouds of light smudged through the trees and hovered over his face. “Can you drive?” he said.

  “Not really. A tractor last summer.”

  He groaned.

  She turned the key. The still-warm engine started, needles danced into life on the dashboard. She pushed her foot down onto the pedal and thrust the gear rudely into first. It ground loudly. She forced it again, revved hard. Smoke poured from the exhaust.

  “Blyad! They will come!” Ivan hauled himself upright, turned his swollen face to look up at the building.

  She took her foot off the clutch and they lurched forward and stalled.

  Hands shaking. She turned the key again. Revved the accelerator.

  “Quick!” Ivan shouted.

  “I’m doing it. I’m doing it!”

  The men were spilling out of the building, alerted by the noise. The gang in a ragtag group behind them. The dog on its chain, leaping and barking.

  She released the clutch. They lurched forward, bouncing across the ground toward the frozen pond.

  “Go over the ice—”

  “It won’t hold us—”

  “Just go, Magda!”

  The gang pushed through the brambles and slid out, shouting. Magda jerked the wheel, swerving to avoid the dinghy frozen in the shallows, and they were out on the ice with a terrible creaking under the wheels.

  “Don’t stop!”

  She gripped the steering wheel hard and stamped down on the accelerator.

  “That way!” Ivan pointed. “The fence is that way.”

  The dog leaped at the window. Its slobber spraying the glass.

  “Go, Magda!”

  She pulled at the gear stick. Into second gear. She saw hands reaching out and the angry faces as the gang scattered, stumbling back on the ice. The car hit the bank and skidded up through the undergrowth. Something crunched against the underside of the chassis. A grating noise—and the back end jumped in the air. But on they went, branches smacking on the roof and tree trunks looming.

  “There!” Ivan shouted.

  Through the trees she saw the fence and the road behind it.

  They had cleared the undergrowth.

  The Jeep churned across the open ground, back end leaping and sliding as it tried to find traction in the deep snow.

  “Now!”

  They smashed through the fence. The steering wheel twisted from Magda’s hands, wheels bouncing over the broken planks and wire, across the pavement, down the curb, and onto the road.

  But she regained the steering wheel, swung right onto the street—with brambles trailing from the rear axle, engine screaming in second, and tires thick with snow.

  And then they were gone.

  Lost in the warren of snow-mired roads that stretched like tentacles across the great cold waking city.

  The girl, Mary, got up and looked out the window at the moonpath reflected on the sea below.

  “I was thinking that maybe I should leave the rest of the story for tomorrow?” she said. “It’s late.”

  Willo stirred up the embers of the fire and threw on a log. “But I want to know what happens—and anyway, you can’t stop a Tell until the good bit comes out at the end.”

  “Good bit?”

  “You got to have some good happen,” Willo said. “Else the child ain’t never gonna sleep.”

  Mary sat back in her chair. “Well, I’m a long way from the end so you better skewer that fish and put it in the fire, because you won’t be getting anything else for supper.”

  The dog pricked up its ears at talk of supper. Like sensible dogs do. And Mary put the baby to her breast and continued—

  18

  An English bull terrier—of the brindled variety: thick shoulders, muscular legs, prominent nose—cocked its leg against the freezing iron railings and relieved itself.

  “Buller!”

  It sniffed at the scent it had left and looked up, wagging a stiff tail at the old lady calling from across the street.

  She waved her stick again.

  “Buller. Come on now!”

  But the dog ran on ahead. He jumped up against the low fence surrounding a playground. Barked at a pigeon sitting cold and hungry on a rusting set of swings. The bird mustered enough energy and flitted to the safety of a tree.

  The old lady ambled along with her walking stick, muttering to herself.

  The dog jumped to the ground and continued along the fence, firm paw prints marking the snow. There was an island of bushes up ahead. A small wild area where it could snuffle about at will.

  “Buller!” the old lady called impatiently, her back hurting. Age was a dose of medicine she could have lived without. She leaned on her stick and gazed at the broken slide and seatless swings in the playground.

  To be bringing up children. Here?

  She thought of her husband, Ant, lying on a stretcher in the corridor of the hospital. “Look out for yourself, Bobby—”

  She saw it all around now. Everything broken down. Dirty and overcrowded. It wasn’t just the frozen water pipes and constant power cuts, the overcrowding and lawless gangs and lack of jobs and hardly any food in the shops all winter. No, worse than all that was the constant cold. Cold everywhere you went, all day, all night, hardly a break in it. Summer, if you could call it that, wet and stormy, and the first snows in October this year.

  Everyone floundering in drifting uncertainties. Just waiting. Not caring who got into power, or what new initiative they were planning, or the whys and wherefores of it. All they wanted to know was: When is it going to get a bit warmer?

  “I tell you, we’re on our way to being a Third World country.” Ant, turning his head on the dingy hospital pillow.

  She heard a beating and throbbing along the cold bricks and stone. The sound of them coming.

  “Buller!” There was a new urgency in her voice. The dog bounded over.

  The street was empty. Just an old Jeep with steamy windows parked beside a boarded-up shop.

  The old lady hurried on. The noise growing louder. She hobbled up the steps to her front door and fumbled with the key. Looking down, she saw that the basement flat still had an old mattress stuffed in the window against the cold. And they had a baby down there.

  The fading sign nailed onto the front door rattled as she forced it open.

  NO POLES

  NO ASIANS

  NO DOGS

  You’re all right, love, it’s the foreigners I ain’t gonna trust with one. Lettin’ them shit all over the house, the landlord had said. But you gotta have a dog to protect yourself at your age.

  “Come on, Buller!”

  The door slammed shut behind her. She made her way up the worn linoleum on the stairs with her hand on the cold white rail and the dog worrying at her feet.

  In her flat, laying her stick in the corner, she pulled down the metal shutters. Sat breathless in an armchair. Her dead husband smiling from a photo frame on the bookshelf.

  “They’ll pass, Buller. It’s all right. They’ll pass.”

  The noise drew nearer.

  Sticks beating. A unified chanting. The words growing intelligible as a crowd streamed through the side streets. Police sirens wailing far off.

  A woman’s voice screeching through a bullhorn.

  “Step up! Death stalks the streets! Men, women, and children. Come out and join us! Help us build the Ark.”

  The crowd answering in unison.

  “FOR ALL OUR TOMORROWS!”

  * * *

  Magda had driven in a rush of adrenaline. Fearful of any passing shadow, she had parked in the first quiet street and locked the doors. It had started to snow again, the bright morning thickening with clouds. She shivered in the cold—listening to Ivan’s loud rasping breaths.

  Later, when he woke, she said:

  “We have to keep going.”

  He sat up and looked through the window. “How much fuel do we have?”

  “Half. The gauge sa
ys half.”

  Ivan climbed over the seat and into the back of the Jeep.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing what else is back here.” He unscrewed the lid on one of the jerry cans. Smelled it. Undid the strap and shook the can. Climbed back into the front seat.

  “What will we do now?”

  “We must go to Liverpool,” he said. “Deliver the passports to Gulbekhian.”

  “And then what?”

  “Gulbekhian will get us back to Krakow.”

  A flag of anxiety slapped up under her ribs.

  It fluttered again, and a sickly nausea welled up in her throat.

  “What if we run out of fuel?” Magda said.

  “We will find a way.”

  She swallowed. Felt a hotness behind her eyes.

  “You don’t have to come if you are afraid,” he said. “You can keep the money we have left. It’s yours anyway. You can do what you want. Find your own way back.”

  “Five hundred zloty? It’s nothing.”

  Ivan stared out the window. “You can come or not come. That is your choice. If you want to turn back now, I’ll find my own way.”

  “I’m not afraid. Even if I have nothing. But I don’t call that a choice!”

  Ivan laughed.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “You. Angry.”

  “I am angry because you don’t care if I come with you or not.”

  “They’re just words, Magda.” And he smiled and put his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close.

  She felt like that dog, sidling close to a foot that kicks.

  A police car flashed across the junction ahead. And an old woman with a dog hobbled past, up the steps of a building, slamming the front door behind her.

  “Ivan—look.”

  A chanting mass of people had surged from a side street at the end of the road. Magda could see faces turned upward, challenging the boarded windows of the surrounding houses. The rampant yelling of a woman with a bullhorn led the mob.

  “Come out and join us!”

  Voices answered in unison.

  “FOR ALL OUR TOMORROWS!”

  Magda started the engine in a panic, crunched the gears into reverse and backed out of the alley. As the wheels dropped over the curb, she hauled the heavy steering wheel around.

  The crowd was drawing nearer.

  “WHADDAWE WANT?”

  “FOODNPOWER!”

  “WHENDOWE WANNIT?”

  “NOW!”

  There was the wailing of sirens. From a turning up ahead, a police car nosed into view.

  And three squat riot vans, grilled windows dark and ominous, lumbered around the corner and fanned out, barricading the street. Army Jeeps screeched behind them, doors opened and soldiers jumped onto the road with guns and riot shields.

  The woman leading the crowd stopped. Masses surging in the street behind her.

  “We’re trapped,” Magda said.

  The woman raised her arm, screamed into the bullhorn with renewed vigor.

  “The time is made for action! Here is the sign! Step up! Death stalks the streets!”

  A voice crackled through a speaker from the riot vans.

  “Disperse now! We have live ammunition. I repeat. Disperse now. Do not advance!”

  Something flew through the air and smashed on the ground. Flames licked across the snow.

  “Drive, Magda!” Ivan shouted.

  Someone waved a banner, screaming at the massed rows of police.

  “Keep calm!” yelled the woman with the bullhorn. “We are a peaceful protest.” The mob engulfed her. “You cannot obstruct us. Join us! We are all disenchanted! WHAT DO WE WANT?”

  “FOOD AND POWER!” roared the crowd.

  Smoke filled the air, smoke and the pushing crowd surrounding the car. Angry faces staring in.

  There now pushed forward a determined motley collection of others. Noticeable suddenly by their clothing—their hats pulled down low, hoods obscuring their faces. Wearing dark glasses, welding goggles, and scarves, and with homemade weapons in their hands.

  A man banged on the hood, an excited face turning away with a grimace. The man leaned back like a javelin thrower and threw a brick. There was screaming. The crowd split every which way.

  “Stop!” screeched the woman into her bullhorn. “We are a peac—”

  But her voice was cut short, and an angry bellowing broke out from the advancing front line.

  A shout went up. “Cover your eyes! They’ve got SMUs!”

  An incredible light pulsed from the riot vans. Hands went up to eyes, people turning, blinded by lasers that punched deep shadows among the crowd.

  The determined group, prepared, surged forward in their goggles and glasses. A swelling throaty rage rose up. Interspersed with screaming—and the bellowing once more from the soldiers at the end of the street.

  “YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO DISPERSE!”

  And then they opened fire.

  The first volley of shots seemed to strike at random. There was an audible gasp. Bodies fell.

  A rattling of shutters. Breaking of glass.

  And then again.

  A bullet ricocheted against a wall and pinged on the side of the Jeep. Stressed shards of masonry sprayed against the windshield.

  Magda released the clutch—her hands like talons on the steering wheel. She would remember the faces, hazy in her blurred vision as she dodged the people, flashing like trees past a train window, leaping out of her way, two men dragging a body to the side of the road, people helpless, stumbling in their blinded panic.

  She swung the wheel and swerved from a woman with blood on her face. She saw a narrow side road, people fleeing down it, blood and glass and bricks on the snow. The soldiers raised their guns again. Shouted through the speakers.

  “Don’t stop,” Ivan shouted.

  Magda fixed her eyes on the road ahead. Gear-clutch-accelerate, dog-legging crazily through the snowy streets, the sound of the roaring engine rising above the yells and shouts. She was aware of the snowflakes spitting angrily on the windshield and the mob of running people disappearing from the mirror. Vaguely she felt that her feet were cold on the juddering pedals of the old Jeep, and smelled the smoke in the air.

  And they were away.

  19

  A short wiry man with tatty hair the color of straw heard the whistling dip and rise of the police siren and slunk quickly down an alleyway that led behind an abandoned warehouse. Above two metal doors at the back of the building the words COOL TOWN SQUAT were painted in fading letters on the dirty gray bricks.

  The man’s name was Rory Moss.

  Rory pulled a key from his pocket and rattled it in the low keyhole, pulling the rolling doors up and over and closing them with a clang behind him.

  He peered into the cavernous workshop, eyes adjusting to the dingy light. He slung the rucksack off his back, took out a roll of tools, and threw a siphon hose and a crowbar down on the oily workbench where he had been breaking an engine for parts that morning. In one corner the chimney from a large unlit wood-burner disappeared through a crude hole in the brickwork.

  He fumbled in the semidarkness and lit a paraffin lamp, then filled the tank of a generator with the last of the diesel from a jerry can. He pulled the starter cord—the generator thumped into life, and he connected jump leads to a bank of tractor batteries on the floor. Digging around in the pocket of his coat, he pulled out a battered mobile phone, which he plugged into a trailing extension cable.

  Turning down the lamp, he tramped up a dusty stairwell at one end of the workshop, with his thin-soled boots scuffing on the dirty concrete steps.

  At the top of the landing, he bashed on a door.

  “Tom! Open the feckin’ door,” he shouted in a faded Irish lilt.

  There was a short wait.

  “That you, Rory?” came a muffled voice.

  “Who the feck do you think it is?”

  The door opened and a scruffy-look
ing man stood in the light. “You find any more diesel?”

  “Did you?” Rory pushed past him into a wide corridor, boots clumping on the bare boards.

  The scruffy-looking man shot the bolts with a scowl and followed Rory into the kitchen. “I was just asking…”

  Rory took off his hat and laid it on the table. A girl sat there smoking a thin tarry roll-up and she looked over and smiled a dirty-toothed smile.

  Someone was asleep under a blanket on an old sofa pushed against the wall.

  Rory put his rucksack down on the floor. The girl got up, brushed strands of long mousy hair off her face. “You get any food?”

  “Yes. In the bag.”

  “Shall I make some tea then?” she said, pulling the long fraying ends of her sweater down over her hands.

  Rory looked at her. Grubby face, greasy hair, clothes that needed washing, dirty boots like his; the floor was filthy, the bare boards dark and grimy, and the snow had started to fall again behind the window, from the tiny rectangle of gray sky visible between the grim-faced backs of the warehouses. “Jayzus.”

  “Where are the others?” he said.

  “Asleep,” said Mousy Girl, placing a large kettle on the range.

  “Well, they could get their lazy feckin’ arses out of bed and help tidy this shitehole up a bit.” He delved into his rucksack and pulled out a stash of food: bread, two eggs, a bag of salt, a sealed plastic bag of milk and a pile of withered parsnips and green potatoes, and a large limp cabbage. He left the two bottles of cheap vodka in the bag.

  “Put the radio on,” he said.

  Mousy Girl plugged in a small radio and fiddled with the dials.

  Krrchk “—in London last night. And now over to Shana on the M40. Shana—”

  They sat silently, listening.

  “—we’d seen the worst chaos yesterday, but both lanes are still solid with traffic. The jams must go on for forty miles in each direction.”

  “And what are the weather conditions like right now, Shana?”

  “Pretty bad. More power lines came down last night. Large stretches of the motorway remain unplowed.”

  “And do we have any idea where all these people are going?”

  “I spoke to one couple”—rustling of paper—“on the northbound carriageway. They’d come from Oxfordshire. They said they’d been cut off for most of January. But, John, a lot of the vehicles on the motorway have been abandoned. Which is causing more problems for the snowplows when they arrive.”