White and Other Tales of Ruin Read online

  Then it had started to snow.

  Hayden had taken Charley upstairs, still trying to quell her hysteria. We had no medicines other than aspirin and cough mixtures, but there were a hundred bottles of wine in the cellar. It seemed that Hayden had already poured most of a bottle down Charley’s throat by the time the three of us arrived back at the manor. Not a good idea, I thought — I could hardly imagine what ghosts a drunken Charley would see, what terrors her alcohol-induced dreams held in store for her once she was finally left on her own— but it was not my place to say.

  Brand stormed in and with his usual subtlety painted a picture of what we’d seen. “Boris’s guts were just everywhere, hanging on the rock, spread over the snow. Melted in, like they were still hot when he was being cut up. What the fuck would do that? Eh? Just what the fuck?”

  “Who did it?” Rosalie, our resident paranoid, asked.

  I shrugged. “Can’t say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not won’t,” I said, “can’t. Can’t tell. There’s not too much left to tell by, as Brand has so eloquently revealed.”

  Ellie stood before the open fire and held out her hands, palms up, as if asking for something. A touch of emotion, I mused, but then my thoughts were often cruel.

  “Ellie?” Rosalie demanded an answer.

  Ellie shrugged. “We can rule out suicide.” Nobody responded.

  I went through to the kitchen and opened the back door. We were keeping our beers on a shelf in the rear conservatory now that the electricity had gone off. There was a generator, but not enough fuel to run it for more than an hour every day. We agreed that hot water was a priority for that meagre time, so the fridge was now extinct.

  I surveyed my choice: Stella; a few final cans of Caffreys; Boddingtons. That had been Jayne’s favourite. She’d drunk it in pints, inevitably doing a bad impression of some moustachioed actor after the first creamy sip. I could still see her sparkling eyes as she tried to think of someone new... I grabbed a Caffreys and shut the back door, and it was as the latch clicked home that I started to shake.

  I’d seen a dead man five minutes ago, a man I’d been talking to the previous evening, drinking with, chatting about what the hell had happened to the world, making inebriated plans of escape, knowing all the time that the snow had us trapped here like chickens surrounded by a fiery moat. Boris had been quiet but thoughtful, the most intelligent person here at the manor. It had been his idea to lock the doors to many of the rooms because we never used them, and any heat we managed to generate should be kept in the rooms we did use. He had suggested a long walk as the snow had begun in earnest and it had been our prevarication and, I admit, our arguing that had kept us here long enough for it to matter. By the time Boris had persuaded us to make a go of it, the snow was three feet deep. Five miles and we’d be dead. Maximum. The nearest village was ten miles away.

  He was dead. Something had taken him apart, torn him up, ripped him to pieces. I was certain that there had been no cutting involved as Brand had suggested. And yes, his bits did look melted into the snow. Still hot when they struck the surface, blooding it in death. Still alive and beating as they were taken out.

  I sat at the kitchen table and held my head in my hands. Jayne had said that this would hold all the good thoughts in and let the bad ones seep through your fingers, and sometimes it seemed to work. Now it was just a comfort, like the hands of a lover kneading hope into flaccid muscles, or fear from tense ones.

  It could not work this time. I had seen a dead man. And there was nothing we could do about it. We should be telling someone, but over the past few months any sense of ‘relevant authorities’ had fast faded away, just as Jayne had two years before; faded away to agony, then confusion, and then to nothing. Nobody knew what had killed her. Growths on her chest and stomach. Bad blood. Life.

  I tried to open the can but my fingers were too cold to slip under the ring-pull. I became frustrated, then angry, and eventually my temper threw the can to the floor. It struck the flagstones and one edge split, sending a fine yellowish spray of beer across the old kitchen cupboards. I cried out at the waste. It was a feeling I was becoming more than used to.

  “Hey,” Ellie said. She put one hand on my shoulder and removed it before I could shrug her away. “They’re saying we should tell someone.”

  “Who?” I turned to look at her, unashamed of my tears. Ellie was a hard bitch. Maybe they made me more of a person than she.

  She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. “Brand thinks the army. Rosalie thinks the Fairy Underground.”

  I scoffed. “Fairy-fucking-Underground. Stupid cow.”

  “She can’t help being like that. You ask me, it makes her more suited to how it’s all turning out.”

  “And how’s that, exactly?” I hated Ellie sometimes, all her stronger-than-thou talk and steely eyes. But she was also the person I respected the most in out pathetic little group. Now that Boris had gone.

  “Well,” she said, “for a start, take a look at how we’re all reacting to this. Shocked, maybe. Horrified. But it’s almost like it was expected.”

  “It’s all been going to shit …” I said, but I did not need to continue. We had all known that we were not immune to the rot settling across society, nature, the world. Eventually it would find us. We just had not known when.

  “There is the question of who did it,” she said quietly.

  “Or what.”

  She nodded. “Or what.”

  For now, we left it at that.

  “How’s Charley?”

  “I was just going to see,” Ellie said. “Coming?”

  I nodded and followed her from the room. The beer had stopped spraying and now fizzled into sticky rivulets where the flags joined. I was still thirsty.

  *

  Charley looked bad. She was drunk, that was obvious, and she had been sick down herself, and she had wet herself. Hayden was in the process of trying to mop up the mess when we knocked and entered.

  “How is she?” Ellie asked pointlessly.

  “How do you think?” He did not even glance at us as he tried to hold onto the babbling, crying, laughing and puking Charley.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have given her so much to drink,” Ellie said. Hayden sent her daggers but did not reply.

  Charley struggled suddenly in his arms, ranting and shouting at the shaded candles in the corners of the room.

  “What’s that?” I said. “What’s she saying?” For some reason it sounded important, like a solution to a problem encoded by grief.

  “She’s been saying some stuff,” Hayden said loudly, so we could hear above Charley’s slurred cries. “Stuff about Boris. Seeing angels in the snow. She says his angels came to get him.”

  “Some angels,” Ellie muttered.

  “You go down,” Hayden said, “I’ll stay here with her.” He wanted us gone, that much was obvious, so we did not disappoint him.

  Downstairs, Brand and Rosalie were hanging around the mobile phone. It had sat on the mantelpiece for the last three weeks like a gun without bullets, ugly and useless. Every now and then someone would try it, receiving only a crackling nothing in response. Random numbers, recalled numbers, numbers held in the ‘phone’s memory, all came to naught. Gradually it was tried less — every unsuccessful attempt had been more depressing.

  “What?” I said.

  “Trying to call someone,” Brand said. “Police. Someone.”

  “So they can come to take fingerprints?” Ellie flopped into one of the old armchairs and began picking at its upholstery, widening a hole she’d been plucking at for days. “Any replies?”

  Brand shook his head.

  “We’ve got to do something,” Rosalie said, “we can’t just sit here while Boris is lying dead out there.”

  Ellie said nothing. The telephone hissed its amusement. Rosalie looked to me. “There’s nothing we can do,” I said. “Really, there’s not much to collect up. If we did bring his … bits … bac
k here, what would we do?”

  “Bury…” Rosalie began.

  “Three feet of snow? Frozen ground?”

  “And the things,” Brand said. The phone cackled again and he turned it off.

  “What things?”

  Brand looked around our small group. “The things Boris said he’d seen.”

  Boris had mentioned nothing to me. In our long, drunken talks, he had never talked of any angels in the snow. Upstairs, I’d thought that it was simply Charley drunk and mad with grief, but now Brand had said it too I had the distinct feeling I was missing out on something. I was irked, and upset at feeling irked.

  “Things?” Rosalie said, and I closed my eyes. Oh fuck, don’t tell her, I willed at Brand. She’d regale us with stories of secret societies and messages in the clouds, disease-makers who were wiping out the inept and the crippled, the barren and the intellectually inadequate. Jayne had been sterile, so we’d never had kids. The last thing I needed was another one of Rosalie’s mad ravings about how my wife had died, why she’d died, who had killed her.

  Luckily, Brand seemed of like mind. Maybe the joint he’d lit up had stewed him into silence at last. He turned to the fire and stared into its dying depths, sitting on the edge of the seat as if wondering whether or not to feed it some more. The stack of logs was running low.

  “Things?” Rosalie said again, nothing if not persistent.

  “No things,” I said. “Nothing.” I left the room before it all flared up.

  In the kitchen I opened another can, carefully this time, and poured it into a tall glass. I stared into creamy depths as bubbles passed up and down. It took a couple of minutes for the drink to settle, and in that time I had recalled Jayne’s face, her body, the best times we’d had together. At my first sip, a tear replenished the glass.

  That night I heard doors opening and closing as someone wandered between beds. I was too tired to care who.

  *

  The next morning I half expected it to be all better. I had the bitter taste of dread in my mouth when I woke up, but also a vague idea that all the bad stuff could only have happened in nightmares. As I dressed — two shirts, a heavy pullover, a jacket — I wondered what awaited me beyond my bedroom door.

  In the kitchen Charley was swigging from a fat mug of tea. It steamed so much, it seemed liable to burn whatever it touched. Her lips were red-raw, as were her eyes. She clutched the cup tightly, knuckles white, thumbs twisted into the handle. She looked as though she wanted to never let it go.

  I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw her. I glanced out of the window and saw the landscape of snow, added to yet again the previous night, bloated flakes still fluttering down to reinforce the barricade against our escape. Somewhere out there, Boris’s parts were frozen memories hidden under a new layer.

  “Okay?” I said quietly.

  Charley looked up at me as if I’d farted at her mother’s funeral. “Of course I’m not okay,” she said, enunciating each word carefully. “And what do you care?”

  I sat at the table opposite her, yawning, rubbing hands through my greasy hair, generally trying to disperse the remnants of sleep. There was a pot of tea on the table and I took a spare mug and poured a steaming brew. Charley watched my every move. I was aware of her eyes upon me, but I tried not to let it show. The cup shook, I could barely grab a spoon. I’d seen her boyfriend splashed across the snow, I felt terrible about it, but then I realised that she’d seen the same scene. How bad must she be feeling?

  “We have to do something,” she said.

  “Charley —”

  “We can’t just sit here. We have to go. Boris needs a funeral. We have to go and find someone, get out of this God-forsaken place. There must be someone near, able to help, someone to look after us? I need someone to look after me.”

  The statement was phrased as a question, but I ventured no answer.

  “Look,” she said, “we have to get out. Don’t you see?” She let go of her mug and clasped my hands; hers were hot and sweaty. “The village, we can get there, I know we can.”

  “No, Charley,” I said, but I did not have a chance to finish my sentence (there’s no way out, we tried, and didn’t you see the television reports weeks ago?) before Ellie marched into the room. She paused when she saw Charley, then went to the cupboard and poured herself a bowl of cereal. She used water. We’d run out of milk a week ago.

  “There’s no telephone,” she said, spooning some soggy corn flakes into her mouth. “No television, save some flickering pictures most of us don’t want to see. Or believe. There’s no radio, other than the occasional foreign channel. Rosie says she speaks French. She’s heard them talking of ‘the doom’. That’s how she translates it, though I think it sounds more like ‘the ruin’. The nearest village is ten miles away. We have no motorised transport that will even get out of the garage. To walk it would be suicide.” She crunched her limp breakfast, mixing in more sugar to give some taste.

  Charley did not reply. She knew what Ellie was saying, but tears were her only answer.

  “So we’re here until the snow melts,” I said. Ellie really was a straight bitch. Not a glimmer of concern for Charley, not a word of comfort.

  Ellie looked at me and stopped chewing for a moment. “I think until it does melt, we’re protected.” She had a way of coming out with ideas that both enraged me, and scared the living shit out of me at the same time.

  Charley could only cry.

  Later, three of us decided to try to get out. In moments of stress, panic and mourning, logic holds no sway.

  I said I’d go with Brand and Charley. It was one of the most foolish decisions I’ve ever made, but seeing Charley’s eyes as she sat in the kitchen on her own, thinking about her slaughtered boyfriend, listening to Ellie go on about how hopeless it all was … I could not say no. And in truth, I was as desperate to leave as anyone.

  It was almost ten in the morning when we set out.

  Ellie was right, I knew that even then. Her face as she watched us struggle across the garden should have brought me back straight away: she thought I was a fool. She was the last person in the world I wanted to appear foolish in front of, but still there was that nagging feeling in my heart that pushed me on — a mixture of desire to help Charley and a hopeless feeling that by staying here, we were simply waiting for death to catch us up.

  It seemed to have laid its shroud over the rest of the world already. Weeks ago the television had shown some dreadful sights: people falling ill and dying in their thousands; food riots in London; a nuclear exchange between Greece and Turkey. More, lots more, all of it bad. We’d known something was coming — things had been falling apart for years — but once it began it was a cumulative effect, speeding from a steady trickle toward decline, to a raging torrent. We’re better off where we are, Boris had said to me. It was ironic that because of him, we were leaving.

  I carried the shotgun. Brand had an air pistol, though I’d barely trust him with a sharpened stick. As well as being loud and brash, he spent most of his time doped to the eyeballs. If there was any trouble, I’d be watching out for him as much as anything else.

  Something had killed Boris and whatever it was, animal or human, it was still out there in the snow. Moved on, hopefully, now it had fed. But then again perhaps not. It did not dissuade us from trying.

  The snow in the manor garden was almost a metre deep. The three of us had botched together snow shoes of varying effectiveness. Brand wore two snapped-off lengths of picture frame on each foot, which seemed to act more as knives to slice down through the snow than anything else. He was tenaciously pompous; he struggled with his mistake rather than admitting it. Charley had used two frying pans with their handles snapped off, and she seemed to be making good headway. My own creations consisted of circles of mounted canvas cut from the redundant artwork in the manor. Old owners of the estate stared up at me through the snow as I repeatedly stepped on their faces.

  By the time we reach
ed the end of the driveway and turned to see Ellie and Hayden watching us, I was sweating and exhausted. We had travelled about fifty metres.

  Across the road lay the cliff path leading to Boris’s dismembered corpse. Charley glanced that way, perhaps wishing to look down upon her boyfriend one more time.

  “Come on,” I said, clasping her elbow and heading away. She offered no resistance.

  The road was apparent as a slightly lower, smoother plain of snow between the two hedged banks on either side. Everything was glaring white, and we were all wearing sunglasses to prevent snow-blindness. We could see far along the coast from here as the bay swept around toward the east, the craggy cliffs spotted white where snow had drifted onto ledges, an occasional lonely seabird diving to the sea and returning empty-beaked to sing a mournful song for company. In places the snow was cantilevered out over the edge of the cliff, a deadly trap should any of us stray that way. The sea itself surged against the rocks below, but it broke no spray. The usual roar of the waters crashing into the earth, slowly eroding it away and reclaiming it, had changed. It was now more of a grind as tonnes of slushy ice replaced the usual white horses, not yet forming a solid barrier over the water but still thick enough to temper the waves. In a way it was sad; a huge beast winding down in old age.

  I watched as a cormorant plunged down through the chunky ice and failed to break surface again. It was as if it were committing suicide. Who was I to say it was not?

  “How far?” Brand asked yet again.

  “Ten miles,” I said.

  “I’m knackered.” He had already lit up a joint and he took long, hard pulls on it. I could hear its tip sizzling in the crisp morning air.

  “We’ve come about three hundred metres,” I said, and Brand shut up.

  It was difficult to talk; we needed all our breath for the effort of walking. Sometimes the snow shoes worked, especially where the surface of the snow had frozen the previous night. Other times we plunged straight in up to our thighs and we had to hold our arms out for balance as we hauled our leg out, just to let it sink in again a step along. The rucksacks did not help. We each carried food, water and dry clothing, and Brand especially seemed to be having trouble with his.