The Bunker Diary (16 page)

No food for two days now. Everyone’s
getting tired and irritable. No one has actually said they blame me, but I can see it in
their eyes. We
told
you it was a stupid idea, we
told
you.

Yesterday the punishment continued with
three hours of deafening noise. I don’t know what it was. Some kind of abominable
music – thunderous drums, horrible screeching sounds, wailing voices … God, it
was awful. And so
unbelievably
loud. There was nothing we could do. We all just
lay down on our beds with sheets and clothing wrapped round our heads, our hands clamped
tightly to our ears … for three infernal hours.

Indescribable.

When it finally stopped, the silence
shrieked with pain.

Four hours of sweltering heat followed by
four hours of arctic chill. Then the heat again, then the cold, the heat, the
cold …

More skull-bursting noise.

Still nothing to eat.

All you can do is live it.

Live through it. Retreat inside your head,
try to switch off, and wait it out.

Nothing lasts for ever.

You can take it.

Take it.

Take it.

At last.

The temperature’s back to normal and
we’ve got food again.
Food
. Tons of it. When the lift came down this
morning it was piled high with all kinds of stuff. Meat, bread, vegetables, fruit,
chocolate … I’ve never seen anything so delicious in my life.

Foooooood!

Russell advised us to eat sparingly at
first. He said if we ate too much on an empty stomach we’d get cramps. We all
listened to him, nodding our heads and drooling, and then we all just piled in and
gorged ourselves like starving animals. It was like one of those Roman banquets you see
in films – bits of fruit and meat flying all over the place, everyone chomping and
chewing and munching and dribbling and burping …

God, it felt good.

Now I’m lying on my bed drinking tea
and grinning at the pain in my belly. It’s a good pain. Good and full. Just to
make it feel even better, I’m trying to remember how it felt to be hungry.
It’s impossible though. I know it felt bad, but I can’t seem to dredge up
the actual feeling of it …

Hold on.

Maybe Russell was right about the
cramps.

I’m starting to feel
something …

Like

No, it’s not cramps

Something else

it’s coming up all over all
through

like electric like a

warm away gone away

warm and weightless

I think it’s

perfect.

hot and thirstless I’ve never
needed anything. Nothing is wrong. The walls are framed in tattered gold.

the garden the garden you’re
back in the garden again. never went away. yesyes, here you are, whupping your bamboo
cane at the hedge and shaking the summer tears from your head. forget it. forget what?
just do what you want. go down to the washing-line pole, go down, go round. go round and
round the washing-line pole, round and round and round and round see it all against the
whirling sky see it all the window house the roof the sun the pigeon trees the sky the
fence the pyramid sky the window house where tigers wait the roof the sun the pigeon
trees hoo hoo just look at the sunborn sky the hedge the rose of thorns rhinoceros horns
the whirling sky where blackbirds soar the window house the roof of sun the big green
trees the fence the gate the whirling sky

now we’re clear.

doing this.

counting the animals in your animal
book.

count the animals.

how many animals? count your fingers.

slowworm of course, he’s in the book.
slowworm rhinoceros tiger lion slug fox bear pigeon dog bear. no. rhinoceros tiger lion
slug fox bear pigeon dog. is a slug an animal? slugdogslog. glug. a slug’s a whale
in a jam jar. hee. elephant whale insect mouse. what’s that funny thing? weasel
cow badger fox. no. flop-eared rabbit weasel.

daddy’s joke

how do you know. no. what’s the
difference between a weasel and a stoat?

a weasel’s weasily recognized and a
stoat is stoatally different.

daddy tells rhymes.

and the other one, the one with the
buffaloes. round and round and round and round

and and and

and the one with the zebra. no. can’t
remember. so. fingers. slowwormrhino nocerous tigerlion slugdog foxbear pigeondog
elephantwhaleinsectmouse weasel cowbadgerfox rabbit stoat budgiegar fleacrab
parrotpeople beebuffalobear eagullee roundandroundandroundandround drink your orange,
plastic warm in the august sun. the washing-line pole is cold as lead. good for swinging
on. round and round. the rope line sways to a rhythm. tink of tin knot collar tink of
tin knot collartink of tinknot collar

how many animals? including people?

we’re all animals

how many animals?

27?

enough for now.

slowworm = 28.

zebra = 29.

2 foxies = 28.

STOP

this is where you are.

here

here sitting on the green grass in the
whirling garden chewing on a stick. drained and dazed. staring at the wall.

there’s only me.

me you me

I’m still here, Mister.

The sun still moves in the sky.

It doesn’t matter what time it is.

A day lasts for ever. Let’s go.

the garden path leads up to the rockery
mountains where the stones are waiting for you to set light to a petrolsoaked spiderman
with a banger in his spidershirt or to take him to the badlands where spiders hunch in
web-hung caves their bulbous backs crossed like donkeys gripped tight in 8 black feet.
donkeys and mexicans german soldiers sergeant fury maybe a mouse. a grizzly bear
rroooaahh! or billy the kid. billy the magic man trapped in a cave with a donkeyspider.
the spider spins him up in his silk and hangs him on a hook and billy waves his magic
wand and taps his magic book and says i am not afraid to die like a man but the burning
fuse of the banger melts his pretty face and when it blows it blows a hole in his
plastic heart aaaahhhh!!! see all these small places are made for cowboys and indians to
wait in ambush or to fight or to fall to their deaths or covered in honeyjam wait for
the ants to come and all these small places are known unto you. so hongkong robocop gets
it in the neck aaaahhhh!!!! these stones aren’t fixed. the middle and bottom ones
are set but the top ones wobble and lift when no one’s looking like now. you can
raise the roof on the sky of another world and let there be light. in flattened mud the
colour of chocolate understone animals panic in the sun. woodlice scatter. worms wriggle
and squirm. muscle-red yellow white like milksick. centipedes. a coughed-up slug. the
hard brown coil of a millipede poke it with a stick. a long thin beetle specked with
green skittles to a hole where it bows its head and ticks to the right then shudders and
turns and ticks to the left going back in time. adjust your grip on the rock and look
closer. see the slickness of the mud and the run of mystery trails. the beetle hole is
rimmed inside
with a pale white glow of tiny eggs. not quite white
they have the colour of underground or dead things and you know you know that if you put
them in an empty matchbox to see what happens they’ll shrivel up to nothing. you
know it. and now you hear your mother’s voice.

LINUS!

a long way away

WHERE ARE YOU?

‘I’m here.’

Later. A million years later.

My head hurts. I feel sick.

The food was drugged.

He drugged the food.

I don’t know what He put in it,
something weird. Christ, I’ve never felt so weird in my life. Not bad-weird
exactly. But not good-weird either. Just weird-weird. Different-planet weird. It was
like I was someone else for a while. Somewhere and something else.

I can’t think about it now.

I have to sleep.

OK, we’ve had a meeting. We had to
get together again. We’re all losing it. We need to recuperate, to console and
comfort ourselves. Shit, we need
something
.

Looking round the table, all I could see
were dying faces.

Jenny, poor kid. She can hardly speak. She
sicked up most of the drugged food so she didn’t suffer too much, but she’s
suffered enough. Sick people, bad dreams, the noise, the heat, the cold – she
can’t deal with all that. She’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake.
It’s too much.

I wrote a note this morning. I got a sheet
of paper from the leaflet-holder on the wall and wrote:
Why don’t you let
Jenny go? Please? Just this one thing. Let her go. I’ll pay for it, if
that’s what you want. I’ll do anything. Tell me what you want me to do,
and I’ll do it. Just let her go. Please.

I knew it was pointless.

A waste of time.

But I did it anyway.

Anja’s just about had it. She’s
starting to look like one of those crazy women you see on the street, the ones who carry
all their belongings in plastic bags and shout at cars. Her face is empty and mad.

Bird keeps staring at everybody like he
wants to kill them.

Russell’s getting sicker by the day. He
can’t speak properly. His speech is slurred and his face is dulled with pain.

Fred though … Fred still looks
pretty strong. Hard and scary. Stony. I suppose he’s used to it. Pain is nothing
to him. It bounces off his head like raindrops off a rock.

And me? Well, I only know my face from the
inside. It feels skinny and hard and raw with hurt.

So there we all were, six dying faces
sitting round the table waiting for someone to speak. The silence was driving me
mad.

‘Come on,’ I said eventually.
‘We’ve got to do something. We can’t go on like this. It’s
killing us.’

Bird laughed. ‘Yeah, right. Good idea.
Do
something.’

‘Linus is right,’ mumbled
Anja.

Bird gave her a cold stare. ‘You think
so?’

Anja lowered her eyes.

Bird shook his head. ‘The last time we
tried
doing
something it didn’t work out too well, did it?’ He
looked at me. ‘If we hadn’t
done
anything then, we wouldn’t
be suffering now.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ I
said. ‘You want me to apologize? OK, I apologize. I’m
sorry
I tried
to get us out of here. Please forgive me.’