Anarchy (26 page)

• • •

It was perfectly quiet after that. Iz had almost fallen asleep when she had a strange dream.

“Tee hee,” a little voice whispered, somewhere close to her ear. Under the bed, perhaps. “Hoo hoo hoo.” She heard a spidery scamper.

“Who's there?” Iz dreamed herself saying. She was too tired to move her head.

“Poo. Stinks.”

“Stinky,” agreed a slightly different voice. They sounded shrunken, as if heard through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Madam Stink.” A third voice, or maybe the first one again. Everything was blurry and sleepy and odd.

“Is it awake?”

“I'm awake,” she said, presumably wrongly.

“Made them scramble.”

“Scramble and tumble.”

“Ramble and scramble and rumble down stairs. Bangety bang.”

“No humpy fumbling.”

“Never again.”

“No more hump hump hump.”

“Shrivel up if he tries.”

“Make his sausage floppy.”

“Hoo hoo.”

“All thanks to Madam Stink.”

“Hee hee. Scared them shitty.”

“Might never come back. Out of the house for good and all. Never never never. Woo hoo. Hail Madam Stink.”

“Hail.”

“Hail.”

“Owe her one.”

“One or two.”

“One.”

“Two. One for him, one for her. Two humpers tumbled and scrambled.”

“Takes two to hump.”

“Two, then. Owe her two.”

“Two lucky slices for the stinky lady.”

“What does it want?”

“What?”

“What?”

“What does it need?”

“A wash. Poo.”

“Soapy water.”

“Feather beds.”

“Snowshoes.”

“Wings.”

“Hope.”

“Going somewhere. Stinks of the road. Where's it going?”

“Gone to sleep.”

“I'm not asleep,” she said again. “I'm going to find my son.”

“Sssss
.
”
There was agitated scratching. “Fibs.”

“Stinking fibber.”

“Hasn't got a son.”

“Hasn't got a daughter.”

“All dried up inside. Barren as bark.”

“On a humping to nothing.”

“Hump hump hump. No bun in the oven.”

“Not a bean.”

“Not a pea.”

“He is my son,” Iz protested, feeling hollow. “He is. I love him.”

“Sssss.”

“Fib fib fib.”

“Two fibs.”

“No son no love.”

“Brazen.”

“Bold as brass.”

“Scratch one off. Lost a lucky slice. Liar liar.”

“One left.”

“None left.”

“One.”

“Two fibs. Two forfeits. None left.”

“Two or one.”

“Two. Lovey dovey. Love love love. Stinky fib.”

“Never loved him.”

“Shut him up.”

“Sent him away.”

“Spat on his dreams.”

“Squashed his squishy little heart.”

“All right. Two.”

“I did love him,” she croaked, in her dream. “You can't say I didn't. I did the best I could.”

“Going to cry now.”

“Boo hoo.”

“Sniff sniff.”

“Madam Snivel.”

“Stinky Madam Snivel.”

“Snivelstink the Lying Lady. No lucky slices left for it.”

“Scared off the humpers, though.”

“True.”

“True.”

“Owe her that.”

“One, then.”

“One.”

“One lucky slice.”

“If it stops sniveling.”

“Better than humping.”

“True, true. Little sniffles.”

“Sleepy.”

“Long road.”

“Worn out.”

“Run down.”

“Could do with a slice of luck.”

“Listen.”

“Listen?”

“Stopped sniveling.”

“Stopped listening.”

“Went to sleep.”

“Whisper a secret?”

“Won't hear.”

“Which makes it a secret.”

“Keep schtum.”

“Silence is golden.”

“Mum's the word.”

“Who's it been humping?”

“Who stuck their sausage in it?”

“Stinks of it all over. Stinks of the road.”

“Tell it the secret.”

“Whisper the name.”

“Is it asleep?”

“No one's listening.”

“God of the Road.”

• • •

The morning came clear and therefore frosty, which made for easier going at first. She met two older men on her way out of the village. They eyed her bags suspiciously and asked where she was going in a tone that made it clear they didn't much care what she answered as long as she wasn't coming back. She thought they were more afraid of her than she was of them.

The map led her southwest. After another slow, punishing hour or two she gained higher land again and stopped to rest her arms and take in the view. It was the brightest morning she could remember for weeks. Under the soft wet blue of the sky she saw what lay ahead: mile after mile of up and down, up and down, a wrinkled white sheet stretching all the way to the distant glittering swell of Bodmin Moor. A helicopter buzzed over the southern horizon; otherwise the scene could have been an arctic desert.

She came to one of the wider north-south roads, following the high ridge above the Tamar Valley. It was marked with the ribbed prints of tractor wheels. Plowing had pushed high banks of snow to its edges, blocking the lane she'd walked up. She had to climb a crumbling wet wall before she could cross. She was gathering her breath and rearranging her soaked gloves and boots on top of this snowbank when she heard a tractor approaching. It hove into view from her right, a dirty blue beast dragging a chained plank behind it, making a smooth flattened track in the middle of the road as it went. It had been days and days since she'd heard an engine so close. She pulled her panniers up beside her out of the way and waited for it to pass by.

It stopped next to her. She looked into the cab, where a bespectacled and messily bearded face stared back at her.

The engine cut off and the door of the cab screeched open. The driver leaned out, unfathomable amazement in his face.

He said: “Jess?”

A hesitant smile creased his beard. He wiped his glasses with the sleeve of a grimy shirt, hopped down heavily from the step, and stared again. “Oh my God. Jess. It's you. I don't believe it.”

Iz hadn't reckoned on encountering anyone resembling a normally approachable human being ever again. She reacted slowly. Her look of hesitant confusion must have been what the man expected to see.

“Greg.” He opened his arms. “It's Greg. I know, I've lost thirty pounds. Hasn't everyone. And got new glasses. My God, I can't believe it's . . .” The smile broke his face wide open. He laughed in delight, crunched forward to climb the snowbank, and before Iz could think what to say or do she was being bear-hugged. “This is amazing. It's so good to see you.”

Very slowly, the significance of what was happening to her, of the name she'd been called, was seeping in. She made her arms close awkwardly around him in return.

“Hello, Greg.”

He backed away to look at her and take a deep breath. He wasn't used to her permanent stench of unwashed exhaustion. “I thought it was you, then I thought it couldn't be. Praise God. What are you . . .” Transfigured with happiness, his face looked bizarrely childlike, a bearded ten-year-old, pink and innocent and hairy and grimy at the same time. He glanced down at the panniers. “You haven't biked here? That's insane.”

“I cycled part of the way. Then I've been walking.”

“Walking? That's unbelievable. . . . Listen to you! Look at you! Okay, it's been fifteen years, hasn't it? That's actually quite a long time, isn't it? Would you have recognized me?” He fluffed his gingery beard. “Satan's facial hair and all?”

“Never,” she said. She was smiling too, she realized, smiling incredulously at the sheer strangeness of the world.

“Of course not. God, I can't believe it. So, walked? From where? Where are you going? Are you off to join Ruth? No, wait, you left before she came, didn't you.” Without warning, his face fell. “Didn't you. Sorry.”

Iz felt like her brain was ice-crusted machinery; she was having to chip at it to get the pieces moving.
Jess. You left.
She said nothing.

“Sorry. That was really tactless of me, wasn't it? Some things don't change.” He tried a faltering grin before looking away. “Bad memories. Let's not talk about that now. It's just amazing to see you again.”

“Let's not.”

“Look, wherever you're going . . . can I help? Do you need somewhere to stay for a bit? This can't be a coincidence. God meant me to find you. In the middle of all this . . . another minute and we'd have missed each other. Amazing. What can I do?”

Five minutes later she was wedged behind him in the cab of the tractor, plowing down the high road, the truth of what was happening to her taking shape minute by unsteady minute.

She'd had a dream she remembered a little too vividly. Cruel voices had taunted her for not being Gav's mother.

Now she was.

The long journey had stripped her down, broken her, and remade her into her dead sister, who'd gone by the name Jess before she died, because Iggy was too silly and Ygraine was too posh. She was being mistaken for her twin. A complete stranger had looked at her and seen Gavin's mother. The unforgivable lie she'd told her boy for fifteen years was being reversed, unsaid, forgiven. It was a good thing the noise of the tractor made conversation impossible, because she found herself wanting to laugh.

21

H
e drove them into a narrow lane west of the main road. A few hundred yards on it began to descend. A beautiful wooded valley curled below them, trees lined with snow like something out of Narnia.

“Too steep for this thing,” Greg shouted over his shoulder. “I leave it up here.” He hopped out to open the padlock on a barn door and steered the tractor in while she waited outside. He emerged pulling a children's sled. He tied the panniers onto it with bungee cords.

“The house is right down near the river,” he said. “Half a mile. It's worse coming back up. Can you manage? What am I saying, you were always much more hardcore than me. You must have walked miles.”

Going down into the valley was like walking into another world, one folded secretly inside the real one, which had in turn been ringed off from what used to be reality by the unnatural winter and the reports of monsters and marvels. They came to a cluster of stone houses with the usual broken windows and air of bleak abandonment. A hand-painted sign on a gate said
travelers welcome in jesus's name
. At the back of the hamlet, on a small rise overlooking the bend of the river, was a slightly bigger and much less damaged house among a scattering of outbuildings. It had once been a mill, Greg explained. A great round pierced stone was propped up near the entrance, mantled with snow. The river itself was visible only as a white channel between the trees, sinuous and unblemished, like a dream of a road.

The house itself was low-ceilinged, white-walled, cluttered like the inside of a tent, and almost colder than the air outside, but it was a dwelling, not a ruin; its chaos and mess spoke of being lived in.

“It's been just me since the new year,” he said, wiping off a chair for her with a plastic tablemat. “Oh, of course, you wouldn't know. I got married. Three kids. That's them.” He pointed at a photo. “I know, if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone, right? Sit down, I'll light the stove. Lil took the kids off to her parents in Leicester. This was no way for them to live. Jules, he's the youngest, he's not three yet.” He smiled vaguely at the picture, and then at her, as if she too were a representation of something he was missing. “God. Jess. You're so— You sound different, do you know that?”

“It's been a long time.”

“You've gone quieter. Sorry, God, I'm embarrassing myself.” He went into a next-door room and started fiddling noisily with pipes and taps. “It wasn't very tactful of me to start talking about the kids either, was it?”

“It's okay,” she called back. She stared through a dirty window at drifts of heaped snow, silently astonished at herself.

“So are you still in touch with any of the others? Katya? Steph?”

“Not anymore,” she said. She could hear how the conversation was supposed to go. Impersonating her sister took no effort at all. She was talking with Iggy's mouth, the mouth that had first kissed her boy. “What about you?”

“Not for years. You know how it is. It's funny, it was all so intense while we were there, and then you leave and . . .” He came back in, wiping his hands. A clogged and smoky smell followed him. “And once you have kids, your world goes like this”—he squeezed his hands around the cloth—“you know? Oh. Oh, God, I did it again.”

“No,” she said. “It's all right. I have a child. A son.”

He blinked, suddenly shyly attentive. “Oh. Nice. That's great. How old?”

“Fifteen last October.”

“Wow, fifteen. Oh, so he's . . .” The shyness turned into hesitant discomfort. “When you left Trelow.”

Trelow.
She'd forgotten she ever knew the name. Perhaps she never had known it; perhaps she was having Iggy's memories now as well as talking with her mouth.
Trelow
was what it was called, the place where she shut herself away when she came back from eastern Europe having found God. Floor heaters and knitted scarves and prayer meetings and biscuits.

Perceptible warmth was coming in now, from the other room. Greg sat down in the only other empty chair, across the rickety table. “I know, I said I wouldn't bring it up, didn't I? I didn't mean to. . . . Anyway, he's all right, your kid? Somewhere clear of all this? Okay. Never mind, we'll change the subject. God knows I miss mine as well.” Iz didn't think she'd started crying; perhaps she just looked as if she was about to. “My fault. We've all had to make hard choices since this began. Of course. Who can endure the day of His coming. For He is like a refiner's fire. I think about that verse a lot.”

She looked at her hands, trying to imagine the way Iggy made choices. Nothing had ever seemed to give her a moment's doubt. Greg stared earnestly at her meanwhile.

“You haven't turned away from God,” he said, finally, “have you?”

It was like being told off by a five-year-old. Iz found it difficult to hold back an unwanted smile.

“God turned away from me,” she said.

“No. Oh no. So many people are saying that and it's so wrong. It makes me so angry.” She'd never seen anything less angry than his rather sweet petulance. He'd obviously never encountered anyone like Nigel. “God's giving us a new world, a whole new way of living, and people are saying he's abandoned us. Like they expect him to make things simple. You can't think like that, Jess. Not you. I can see you still live in faith. What else would you be doing walking all the way down here through the snow? That's—” He checked himself, leaning back in the wooden chair with its peeling grey paint. “Okay, look, I won't harangue you. Ha. That's a bit of a turnaround, isn't it? Remember how you used to sit me down and tell me my faith was weak?”

“Of course I do.”

“Used to drive all of us crazy the way you did that, but I still . . .” She saw him blushing. “Anyway. Fifteen years ago, wow. Happy days. I miss Trelow, you know?”

“Me too.”

“Oh, I'm making tea, in case you were wondering. Old time's sake. No biscuits, though. The days of biscuits are gone.” She smiled with him, sharing whatever joke it was. “I'm glad you remember it happily too. Such an amazing way to live. You know, it wasn't the same after you left.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. It was never quite— We still did lots of good work. Important stuff. But, you know, the feel changed. The group dynamic or something. Ruth kind of took over when she arrived. Anyway, after a couple of years I met Lil, so that was that.”

“Of course.”

“I've never been back. Funny. It was my whole world for four years. It still feels like this really important time in my life. But I've never wanted to go back. It's not even that far from here, but somehow . . .”

“Neither have I,” she said, after he trailed off.

He looked at her shyly. In the next room a kettle of water was beginning to stir.

“Is that where you're going now?” he asked.

“No.”

“No, of course not, there can't be anything left at Trelow by now. It's been terrible down there. Much worse than here, from what I've been hearing. But you're going on into Cornwall?”

“Yes. I'm looking for someone.”

“Ah. God. I still can't believe you actually walked this far. From, where was it?”

“London. I only had to walk the last few days.”

“Days!”

“I'm not sure how many. I lost track.”

He shook his head admiringly. “You always were sort of unstoppable. They've been turning people back, you know. The army's on all the roads.”

“Not the kind of roads I took.”

He looked at the two panniers, and at the calloused stripes on her palms where she'd been carrying them by their awkward handles. “Lugging all that. Someone's been watching over you, Jess. You may not realize it, but there's no doubt.”

“Maybe you're right.”

“I know I am. So you got over that thing, obviously.”

She felt herself on shaky ground for the first time. She tried to look innocently uncertain.

“With going outside. Obviously. So that was a prayer answered, wasn't it?”

She wanted to mumble something noncommittal, but he'd fixed her with an eager, cajoling look. “I'm not sure what you mean,” she said.

He frowned. “You're not telling me you only walked at night?”

“No.”

“So your skin's fine now. With sunlight.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to think of a way to change the subject. She'd completely forgotten how to talk to people. “Yes.”

He looked mournful, or perhaps disappointed. “You prayed day after day to be saved from that. We all prayed together. Don't you remember?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“You don't want to give God the credit, do you. All right. I said I wouldn't harangue you. You'd probably rather be out by yourself in the snow than put up with that.”

“It's so good to rest a bit.” Warmth, proper warmth, was trickling into her, like forgotten happiness. “Thank you.”

“No, no, this is wonderful. Seeing you. It's been pretty lonely, to be honest. I mean, I have the people I look after up the road, but coming back here every day . . .” He waved apologetically at the room. It was beginning to fill with a fine steam, beading on the window, furring the damp-stained walls, clouding the plastic tubs of toys stacked in the corner. “It's very solitary. I never had that urge to be a hermit. Not like you and Steph.”

Iggy,
she thought,
a hermit?
Iggy had despised people who hid away from the world. She'd burned with her sense of duty.

But then everything had changed in the last couple of years. Iz had been as astonished as anyone when she'd got her copy of the circular letter Iggy wrote announcing that she was going to live in a Christian retreat deep in the country, that she'd changed her name, that no one would hear from her. Being Iggy, of course, she meant it. There'd been nothing after that, not so much as a Christmas card. The next thing she'd known was two years later, the doorbell ringing at home one evening and her twin on the doorstep, wild and haggard and pale as death, and a tiny baby in her arms.

“You must be shattered,” Greg said. Iz realized she'd forgotten he was there. “Do you want that tea?”

“Sorry. Yes. Please.”

“It takes ages to boil water. It takes ages to do anything, actually. It's all a bit medieval. It'll get there, though. I usually leave a big bucket of snow on the top every morning. So there's hot water by the afternoon. For washing and stuff.”

“Right,” she said, since he was looking at her expectantly again.

“So, um. If you feel like a bath . . .”

• • •

Hot food and water were pleasures so overwhelming they threatened to make her cry. The valley grew dark outside while the two of them sat at another table beside the range stove. The only light was the glow from the little chamber at its base where the wood burned. He hadn't bothered with candles or oil lamps, he said, since it was just him in the house after dark with nothing to do. They ate tinned beans and crackers. Everything came from the town down on the main road, he told her, but he hadn't been for more than a week and he'd given his rations of meat to the older people he kept an eye on in their remoter villages. He appeared not to have any notion what she'd been living on since her purchasing power ran out many miles and many days ago, and kept apologizing for not being able to offer things she remembered as distantly as dreams: fruit juice, ham.

“You know,” he said. The speckled grime of his glasses had gone opaque in the faint gleam of ember-light. “There was a rumor going around that you'd died.”

“Who told you that?”

“I can't quite remember. I think Katya said she'd heard something about it.”

“Well,” she said, holding a spoon close to her lips; even the warmth of the metal was magical. “Here I am.”

“A lot of us felt really bad about it, you know. Not,” he added hastily, “you being . . . I mean, of course, no one wanted to believe that. But about what happened. I think we . . . I remember Kat facing up to Chloë and Dave a few times and telling them we'd all gone too far.”

She said nothing.

“I know I felt the same way. I'm not making excuses, Jess. Honestly I'm not. I was part of it and I went along with it so I can't say I didn't mean it. But afterward we didn't all feel we'd done the right thing. We talked about it. A lot.”

“There was always plenty of talking.”

He chuckled nervously. “You couldn't have stayed, though, could you? Not making excuses again, but it wouldn't have worked, would it. I've done the baby thing myself a few times now. God. Imagine a baby at Trelow.”

If they hadn't thrown her out when she was pregnant,
Iz thought,
Gavin would never have become my child. He'd never have had to put up with me. He'd have grown up with people who understood him and loved him.

“I could have done it,” she said. “I'd have made it work.”

He looked down. There was a long silence.

“Then I should ask your forgiveness,” he finally said. “Maybe that's why God brought you here. So I can make up for it.”

Iggy too had that perpetual bizarre conviction that everything was about her. Iz felt a pang of her old irritation at the self-absorption of fanatics, but swallowed it down. It was a trace of her former self, and she wanted nothing more to do with that person.

“So. Do you forgive me, Jess? I'm asking humbly. I'll understand if you can't.”

She glimpsed her sister's unknown history like a ghost in the darkness of the house, waiting behind him. Why hadn't she ever wondered about it? Because there was a tiny baby to occupy all her attention; and because her husband broke off the conversation if she so much as mentioned Iggy's name.