Anarchy (16 page)

13

M
arina?”

No answer. No running footsteps upstairs, either. He saw her shoes in the hallway, though, and the only marks in the grainy snow outside the front door had been made by small animals, or were his own.

“Marina!” She'd left the door unbarred again. He pulled it shut. The noise rolled ahead of him, expiring in the house's empty passages. He edged forward in the gloom, holding a canvas bag to his chest. His shoulders ached from carrying it. There were no easy journeys anymore, not even bringing the shopping. “Marina?”

He stepped on something yielding. It crunched. He jerked his foot away. As his eyes accommodated to the shadows, he saw a small brown dead thing on the hallway floor. A songbird, mangled. The cat had broken off its head.

The house was freezing, as usual. There was still plenty of wood in the stable barn after all these bitter weeks but, because, she wouldn't use it. He'd start a fire in the main room, he thought, once he'd rested his arms.

He carried the bag toward the light at the far end of the hall, calling up the stairs. The sloping field beyond the window caught his eye. It had been white for so long, he'd forgotten it could ever change its face. Now it was mottled with grey slush and pocked all over with what looked like shallow bullet holes, the impact craters of sleety rain.

“I brought some food!”

He set the bag down in the kitchen. There were plates on the floor, scattered with peelings and wilted leaves. Feathers and tiny bones. She and the cat ate together, both half wild. The larder smelled of stale milk. He poured the four-pint bottle he'd brought into a clean jug and tipped the remnants of the last one out the window, under trickling eaves. He unwrapped the cheese and left it in paper on a shelf, promising himself he'd watch her eat at least a few bites later. Everything else he left in the bag while he went to find her.

The cat hopped soundlessly down the stairs, meeting him halfway. It was looking lean too, but at least it was happy to see him.

“Marina? Where are you? It's me. Owen.”

He hoped she might be asleep, for once. Since she'd been on her own, six or seven or eight or however many weeks it was now—the calendar, like a lot of things that before the snow had felt as ordinary and inevitable as oxygen, no longer seemed much use as a way of describing the world—he'd had no firsthand evidence that she ever slept at all. But all the beds were empty. All the rooms too. She must have gone out somewhere barefoot.

(He had a sudden memory from the previous summer: Marina sitting on the front step in sunshine, laughing at something he'd said while she bent forward to lace up her shoes, suddenly almost pretty in a way that wasn't quite childlike anymore, and he noticing that and being struck by the unwanted thought:
How much longer can this go on?

Not long at all, it turned out.)

He was about to go back downstairs when a draft surprised him. She'd left a window open, then. All night, probably. Though the snow had begun to thaw at last, the nights were still icy. He followed the trickle of cold air. The cat overtook him, lolloping ahead and disappearing around a narrow side door. With that, he realized where she was hiding.

“Marina?”

He hadn't seen that door open for years, so long that he'd forgotten it wasn't just a cupboard. Behind it was a flight of tiny twisting stairs. The chill spiraled down them. He put his head around the first corner and called up.

“Is it all right if I join you?”

No answer. He sighed, ducked, squeezed himself into the ascent.

A hatchlike window under a cramped gable led out onto the roof of the house. The cat's tail brushed out ahead of him. He'd lost weight himself or he doubted he'd have been able to wiggle after it. Lean months. People like him, comfortable English people, had lost their collective memory of such times. The myth of perpetual abundance had stopped being a myth. This is how it is, they'd thought, and how it always will be: always more than enough.

Not for the first time he wondered whether everything that had happened was really surprising at all.

The back of a hooded head stuck out on the far side of the peak of the roof. She was looking northward, perching on the slates. They looked too steep and brittle for him. There was a low parapet around the roof line but he still felt queasy, high up and out in the open. He kept his feet on the frame of the midget window and held on to the gable as he stood straight. The cat came marching along the ridge of the roof and nudged at his hands as if it thought it might be funny to try to push him off.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

“Aren't you cold?”

“Not really. You always ask that.”

Now that he was standing, albeit precariously, he could see over the top of the roof. The trees at the edge of the garden screened the house, but she was high enough here to see partly over and partly through their bare tops, across the river valley to the fields around the church on the opposite bank. The clusters of tents stood out against the snow, strips and squares of color. Some of them had collapsed, some blown down to join the spackling of litter pinned against the lower hedges. Through the knotted treetops they could just about see a couple of people moving around the camp.

“I brought some fresh milk for you. And a few other bits and pieces.”

“Thank you.” She still hadn't turned around.

“I'm sorry I haven't been able to come for the last couple of days.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Doesn't it? But I'm sorry anyway.”

Now she twisted her head around. The baggy hood still hid her face. It was one of the sweaters Gwen had knitted for her, more like a woolly sack than a garment.

“I'm not,” she said. “I told you, I don't mind.”

She turned back northward, to watch her tiny fraction of the larger world.

“Do you want to come in for a bit?” he suggested, cautiously.

“I don't know. I don't know what I want. I don't know if I want to do anything.”

“Oh, Marina.”

“There are less of them than there used to be. Fewer. Do I mean fewer? They must have finished whatever they were doing.”

His back was beginning to stiffen. It was still cold—always cold—and he was standing awkwardly. Once upon a time, small imperfections like that had been worth thinking about. Whole lifetimes had been spent mitigating them; millions of people dedicating their existence to pursuing the absence of discomfort.

“How long have you been coming up here?”

“I don't know. Some days.”

“You've been . . . careful, haven't you?”

She didn't answer.

“Marina?”

“No,” she said, “I haven't.”

She was well enough hidden where she sat, he thought. Screened by the trees, camouflaged against the slate and stone of the old roof. But still. He ought to try to talk to her about it.

“Would you look at me? Please?”

“If you like.”

She didn't look any worse, really. She'd always been very thin and she'd never been particularly clean or tidy. A couple of weeks ago (was it?) she'd got annoyed with her hair growing long and cut it herself, with the iron shears. The result—a ridiculous crop halfway between do-it-yourself punk and tufted duck—didn't help, but if he tried not to get distracted by it, or by the radiant unhappiness of her expression, he had to admit she looked no less healthy than usual, not that
healthy
was quite the word.

“You look awful,” she said.

He had to laugh.

“I'm not very good with heights.”

“I only just discovered you could open that window.”
Only just
could mean the past few hours or the past few years, in Marina's language. Of course, he thought. For as long as she's known, any day of each season has been much like another, until . . . this. “Daddy and Gwen always said it was stuck.” She pushed her hands deeper inside their opposite sleeves.

“I imagine they didn't want you exploring out here. It could be risky. These tiles aren't meant for walking on.”

“It's just more lies.”

A helicopter whirred over the horizon, angling west to east. He met her angry look. He'd never had children of his own, but he'd spent plenty of time talking to teenagers in the parish.

“No one can tell the truth all the time. Especially not to children. It doesn't mean they didn't—”

“Don't say it.”

His fingers were beginning to sting from gripping the stone. “All right.”

“Don't say that to me again. Ever.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'd never lie.” If he'd had any grief left over after the past three months, he'd have been heartbroken listening to her. She sounded just the same as the girl he'd watched grow up, and yet not the same: her impulsive simplicity had turned into the twisted shadow of itself, a determined bitterness. She seemed ten years older. “I'd never tell anyone anything I knew was wrong. If a child ever comes out of me I'll always tell her the truth. I'll promise her as soon as she comes out. ‘I'll never lie to you and I'll never go away,' that's the first thing I'll say.”

“Marina—”

“Don't!” It was a tight scream. The ring of trees echoed it for a dull instant.

The helicopter drifted nearer. Its monotone buzz broke into a
chop-chop-chop.
He waited as long as he could before speaking again.

“We ought to go inside.”

Around the church, a couple more people appeared out of their tents. The church bell began to ring.

“I know you're very unhappy.” He spoke as calmly as he could. “But things could get much worse if someone saw you and decided they wanted to find out who lived here.”

“There's nothing wrong with them. I've been watching. They just go in and out of their little houses.”

“People have done terrible things.”

“Where?”

“Lots of places. You'll just have to believe me, Marina. I know what could happen.”

“Are these things worse than what everyone did to me?”

The bell in the church tower kept ringing, though it didn't look like many of them were left to answer it; as she'd said, they were mostly gone now. The helicopter veered in their direction.

“If you don't come in soon,” he said, “I'm afraid I'm going to have to try and fetch you myself.” A useless threat, he suspected, looking at the age-smoothed slates, but just as he was wondering whether he'd have to give it a go anyway she hitched herself back and swung her legs over the top of the roof. She had thick green socks on. They must have been her father's.

“You sound like you're talking to Grey Mouser. My bottom's getting sore anyway.”

Downstairs, he began laying a fire in the living room. Its chimney was the likeliest to spread at least a suggestion of warmth through parts of the floor above. She followed him unenthusiastically. Everything in the house was out of place. She'd dropped things wherever she'd tired of them. When she peeled off the hooded sweater she looked like a mournful scarecrow.

And yet—he noticed it as she stood behind him, watching his efforts with matches and kindling—and yet for a painful moment he felt the tug of her. His heart thumped in warning and his hands trembled. The pyramid of twigs he'd been working on collapsed.

“You needn't bother,” she said. “It'll just go out.”

He forced himself to concentrate on his hands. “Not if you keep an eye on it. A couple of logs every few hours and it could go on forever. There's stacks of wood.”

“I'll just leave it after you go.”

“Well then.” He propped the last sliver of wood up and struck a match, cradling the flame. One of the lasting benefits of his training in the priesthood, it turned out, was that he'd become good at patience. The terrifying irrelevance of everything else he'd spent so much time learning and thinking about was largely balanced out by the fact that patience, his only surviving asset, had turned out to be the one thing he and everyone else needed most. He remembered learning that at root it was the same word as
suffering.
They meant the same thing. “How about keeping it going for Grey Mouser? She must like it.”

“She doesn't need us to look after her. Anyway, it's getting warmer. The snow's beginning to melt.”

The wood caught quickly, as it always did. Magic. The fireplaces drew and the walls stayed sound, the well was always sweet, the teenage girl standing behind him was a siren's child. That was the world now. He'd had years to try to get used to it and never managed. What must it be like for everyone else?

He stood up and faced her. The little sting inside him pricked again. A siren's child, and she was growing up, growing into herself.
Don't touch her
, he told himself. He clasped his hands behind his back to make sure.

“There. That's done. I'll put a pot over it, shall I? I brought some things you can boil up. They're all in the kitchen. And you'll have hot water.”

She crouched down and scratched the cat's head as it rubbed around her legs.

“I'll eat it,” she said, sounding all at once much more like the Marina he remembered, hesitant and eager to please, “if you stay and make it.”

His heart sank. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I would if I could.”

The glimmer of eagerness flickered out. “Never mind.”

“Honestly. I wish I could stay all day. I come as often as I can.”

“You needn't come at all.”

“Please don't be like that, Marina.”

“That's a stupid thing to say. Gwen always said how stupid it was.” She'd finally started talking about Gwen in the past tense. “‘Don't be like that.' You only have to think about it and you can see it's stupid.”

Patience. Suffering. “It's quite difficult getting food at the moment. If I stayed here, I wouldn't be able to get to other people.”