Конрад Уильямс - One

Stanley had digested this, his eyes wide and fixed on the

middle distance as they were whenever he thought hard about things, and said: ‘Will I die?’

‘Everyone dies, mate.’

‘Oh,’ Stanley said, and his eyes turned glassy with tears. ‘Will you die?’

Jane nodded.

‘Before me?’

Jane had almost said I hope so but thought that would confuse him. ‘Yes, Stan.’

‘Oh, Dad. I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die.’

‘I don’t want to either. But don’t worry. It won’t be for a long, long time.’

Stanley had become a little more clingy than usual after that. He woke up in the night and called for him and he would go, sensing Cherry stiffen beside him. ‘I luff you with all my heart, Dad. I luff you for a five hundred million hundred three minutes.’

Cherry seemed to resent the attention Stanley was giving Jane. And he was at a loss to explain why his son was favouring him. ‘It’s just a phase,’ he suggested. ‘A male thing. It doesn’t mean he loves you any less just because he doesn’t tell you. Boys can be awkward sods.’

Cherry rejected this. She claimed Jane was encouraging Stanley’s ambivalence, using it as a wedge between him and his mother. Jane had been shocked. ‘Why would I do that? Why would I want to turn Stanley against you?’

‘Because you want custody of him.’

He remembered the impact of that, how it had floored him, numbed his tongue. She had that ability, to throw something into an argument that was unexpected, that didn’t follow the fight’s trajectory or logic. How had he responded? He could barely recall it in the wake of her face twisting, the demand that blasted out of her. He must have said something like ‘But I don’t want a divorce.’

No, but I do, Richard. I do .

The compression of distance through the binoculars was difficult to cope with. It disorientated him sometimes when he saw some flash of difference in the brown reaches of burnt land and removed the glasses to check its position in relation to him to discover that he couldn’t see it. Then he didn’t know where to aim the binoculars in order to find it again. Once he had it back in his sights he was more careful, and discovered that it was much farther away than he had believed. He had never used such powerful lenses before: all the binoculars he had ever tried previously had been weak; toys, really.

In the main, these flashes he saw were tangles of fleece snagged on barbed wire, or fragments of plastic, or on one occasion a bottle-green sequined dress stuck against a fence post, arms waving hysterically in the wind. Every sighting caused a palpitation in his heart. He desperately wanted it to be someone, but he didn’t know what that might mean. If this was some kind of assault from an aggressive country, there was every chance that an invasion was under way. He didn’t want to be clapped in irons and sent to a concentration camp, or shot dead on the spot. He also didn’t want to be hampered by an injured companion, or have to tend to someone who might be slowly choking to death on their own lungs.

He walked. He was back on the A1 now, the tarmac swollen and broken, melted and resealed in strange lava patterns. It reminded him of a river’s currents frozen in a snapshot. He stopped thinking about the binoculars and the possibility of survivors for a while and ate up some ground. His boots were comfortable; no blisters yet. He felt stronger. He ate little and often. He had filled a three-pint water bladder from bottles in the cellar of buildings just south of Scremerston and stowed them in the water pouch of his rucksack. It was a heavy pack now, but he kept reminding himself of the troops yomping from Carlos Water to Teal on East Falkland. They never gave up, and there was death waiting for some of them at the end of it all.

There were countless fields on either side of the dual carriageway. The haze made all that acreage of black-brown tremble. There were sections of the road that had not been barred by vehicles, but there was a surprising amount of traffic. He averted his head when he walked by, but something wasn’t making sense. He snorted a little, mildly amazed that he could think like this in the middle of an entire situation that wasn’t making sense.

The day passed quicker when he was intent on the road. He bypassed Haggerston with barely a glimpse at its castle. Further east lay the causeway connecting Lindisfarne to the mainland. The Holy Island was beyond reach now. The sea would have erased that link for ever. Maybe the island itself was drowned. He looked through the binoculars but could only see a riot of ocean and sky, as if the two elements were wrestling over a prize. He walked on, developing his rhythm. He started chanting Stanley’s name, and his own, and Cherry’s too. A triumvirate to spur him on, even though he knew there were only ever likely to be limited permutations of the three by the time he found them. But you never knew… a national disaster, a child in peril, estranged parents reunited. It happened all the time in Hollywood.

Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard .

As a child he’d attended Scouts a few times. Hadn’t stuck it. There was something about uniforms after school that sapped the enthusiasm from him. That and the dumb tasks they set at this particular hut: you and two friends are going on a three-day camping expedition, so how many boxes of cornflakes are you going to need? He had to get home by himself afterwards if his dad was on nights and had the car. He’d alleviate the monotony of a long walk back in the dark, often accompanied by rain, by doing the Scout jog, which was twenty paces running, twenty paces at a fast walk: the fartlek before its time.

Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard. Stan-ley, Cher-ry, Rich-ard.

Jane was intoxicated by the distance he’d managed. His heart was pumping hard and he was alive. He was alive. He stopped to rest and lifted the Nikon glasses to sweep the area south of Alnwick. Newcastle was a knot of wet iron in the distance. He could make it in maybe four days, if he marched hard. The road was not flat, but it was not so undulating or jagged as to hamper him too greatly. The dried meat and dried fruit he had found in a farmhouse cellar was keeping his spirits up; he’d even lucked upon a couple of slabs of dark chocolate in a tin marked IZZY’S STASH – KEEP OUT! He wasn’t wanting for energy. But finding such food, such good food, made him wonder a little about the future, despite his intention to keep himself focused on the present. The vegetation frazzled, the food chain compromised. No animals. No food. How much of this kind of thing was going to be buried treasure in the months and years to come? He could see himself stumbling, cadaverous, through villages, his clothes flapping on him, too weak to unscrew the top from an undiscovered jar of jam he might come across in a forgotten pantry. What about water? An image, unbidden, of vultures sitting on the shattered street lamps of Oxford Street, the birds’ beaks stained crimson. An image of himself, a scarecrow, shambling beneath their keen eyes, calling out for his family, calling out for anybody, but there was nobody left. Just six million corpses mummifying in the furnace blast of a storm that would not cease.

Jane forced his thoughts outward, and his eye caught the feather nestled into his rucksack. No birds. No nothing. No people.

He snatched up the feather and studied it. He retrieved the guidebook and savagely flicked through the pages, looking for something that might help him identify its provenance. The pictures of birds calmed him, even though he knew they were eternally trapped between these pages, that he’d catch no sight of them here. A big wedge-shaped feather it was, edged with broad sections of creamy white. He held it to his cheek, felt the fragile, firm ruffle as he ran his fingers along its edge, then tried to scent something of the bird via the quill, but there were no smells beyond that of the burned, congealed sky.