Конрад Уильямс - One

‘What if you go to France, or Holland, or wherever, and it’s the same? If it’s worse?’

‘Dad’s gone. It doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t care one way or the other any more. I just want some kind of result. I want to force the issue. I want to be a catalyst.’

He looked out to the water as if he was considering charging back in to make some attempt at rescue. Perhaps it bothered him that he’d given up so easily. Jane wanted to put an arm around him, to tell him that it was all right. Things had changed so much, it was hard enough to keep track of it, to keep ahead mentally, let alone react quickly enough when something horrible happened right in front of your eyes. Everyone had a tale to tell. Tragedy had not spared a single person. He didn’t need to say a word.

‘So you’ll stay?’ Loke asked him.

Jane found himself nodding although he had not come to any kind of decision. He had walked all this way to be with Becky. Maybe because there was some decision brewing to try to persuade her to stay in the UK. The thought of her on some rickety floating island with a baby inside her was unbearable.

If it’s a boy… and it is a boy, I know that, I know… we’ll call him—

‘But what will you do?’ Loke persisted.

‘We’ll keep going. It’s all we’ve ever done. We’ll fight them on the beaches.’

‘Jesus. You must have kids. You must be a dad.’

Jane nodded again, and was able to smile. ‘I was, I am. And will be again,’ he said.

‘I never had kids,’ Loke said.

‘It changes you,’ Jane said. ‘You lose your ego. You realise that life isn’t just all about what you want, what you can have, or take. It’s a good feeling. You slowly pull your head from out of your arsehole. You make sacrifices, and you do not resent it. Not one bit.’

‘Yeah, well. Maybe now’s not the best time to become a dad.’

Jane nodded. He hadn’t really thought a great deal about that. The shock of the news had blinded him to what it actually meant. Becky giving birth would be hard enough. Where were the paediatricians, the midwives? What if the baby was born as Stanley had been, limp and grey, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck? And what kind of world was this in which to bring up a child?

The beach grew chill and dark. Jane recalled a bluff in Keri, on the south-west tip of Zakinthos, a Greek island that he had visited with Cherry. It had been renowned for its sunsets. He remembered Cherry leaning against him as they sat on the rocks watching the sun sink. A girl of around nineteen took off her clothes and stood with her arms outstretched towards it, smiling broadly. Her skin had been dark pewter. When the sun vanished, they stayed on to watch the colours in its wake, amazed by the range it shifted through, as if someone were applying ever more dramatic filters to the sky.

He didn’t know if it was the girl, or the way Cherry’s body yielded against his, or the soft heat of the sun. He didn’t know if it was the cool, spiced ruffle of dusk air against their skin as they drove back to the hotel in the open jeep. He didn’t know if it was the ouzo, or Cherry’s inky eyes, or the kiss she gave him as they stood on the balcony. But their lovemaking seemed to take on a fresh intensity that night. It was as if the dying of the sun had acted as some kind of omen. A reminder that life was no more than a blink of the eye in the grand scheme of things. She held him inside her and it was like desperation, or fear. They made love a lot on that holiday, but with nothing like the same intensity of that one night. Jane liked to think that Stanley was conceived then.

Now he searched the sky for some clue as to where the sun had set. He couldn’t believe that beyond that layer of cloud was blue sky and a gorgeous blazing yellow star. It came to him, in dreams, as a cold steel sphere. It was hard to recall the colour of it. The colour was life but there was nothing, other than the beggared remainder of the human race, to remind him what that meant.

‘PAUL!’

Jane started. He had been drifting into sleep, the drugs that the medics had given him removing the pain in his arm and reminding him of his tiredness. Now he felt fully awake. Loke was down by the shore, scurrying towards the oily tide as it retreated, withdrawing when it surged back up the sand. There was a body tumbling in the push and pull of the surf; Loke was trying to fish it out. Jane hurried down to the water. Loke clearly didn’t want to feel the sea on him again. He had talked of it burning like bleach, and feeling greasy, a sensation he couldn’t get out of his skin, no matter how many dry baths he took in the shingle. Jane was looking around for a piece of driftwood when the sea seemed to tire of playing with the body, and pushed it further up the beach where Loke was able to grab hold of it under the arms and pull it clear of the water’s edge.

Jane could see that it was a dead man, but Loke was too pumped up to acknowledge it. ‘Paul!’ he kept crying. ‘Dad!’

There were massive injuries to the torso. Something had taken bites out of him the size of serving platters. His legs ended at the knee; the rags of his trousers prevented any scrutiny of what remained. The face was clogged with shards and scraps of itself. Livid, bloodless wounds were carved into him like a poor Halloween pumpkin. He flapped and sagged in too many places to even be in one piece, let alone still be alive.

Jane put out his hand to restrain Loke, who was checking his father’s mouth, and tilting his head back to open his airway. Something gritted inside.

‘Loke,’ Jane said.

‘Shut up.’ Loke started performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. He laced the fingers of one hand into the other and rhythmically pumped them into Paul’s sternum. He seemed oblivious to the black seawater pulsing from the jaws with each downward thrust.

Jane left him to it. He walked back to the little hollow he’d dug himself. Fires had been built up and down the beach. It was encouraging to see so many. He had a vision of more fires, hundreds and hundreds, burning on the beaches and in the hills of the country. Maybe there would be a way back from this. Maybe the Skinners could be defeated. Maybe the clouds would part and the sun would heal the planet. Green shoots and a nation of pregnant women.

He was so engrossed in his reverie that he didn’t hear Loke approach. He slumped to the shingle like a sack dumped from a weary shoulder.

‘This woman of yours,’ Loke said in a voice that was resigned but also, it seemed to Jane, relieved. ‘This Becky. Do you know where the Skinners took her?’

Jane turned his head to the south. The edge of his country. The lowest part of it. The world was fringed with a trembling red light there. He hoped it was just the colour of the fires that had been stoked all around, but he knew it was not.

‘That way,’ he said. ‘Past the power station. I don’t know how far.’

‘And you’re going? You’re going to try and get her back? Even though you’ll probably die?’

Jane turned back to the sea. Becky was carrying his child. It ought to have been a question that didn’t need airing. Loke would know, one day, when he was staring down at a big raw mouth with a bunch of skinny limbs attached. Death was nothing when your child’s safety was at stake. Death was a puny streak of piss. Beneath contempt.

‘You know the answer to that.’

Loke nodded. He was wiping his hands on his jeans. He had done his best to bury his father in the shingle. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

They left the camp when the last of the fires had burned down. The rain returned, that soft, insistent mist that had blurred virtually every day of Jane’s life since the Event. Loke helped him put on his coat, pausing every time Jane winced when the fabric caught on the blistered, bubbled length of his forearm. They walked south, heading for the black bulk of the nuclear reactors. The shivering line of red light was like a skin on the ground far in the distance. Jane remembered how a similar light had cowed him at the western edges of Heathrow airport. He wondered how long it would be before the screams reached their ears. He thought too of how tardy he was; what if she was dead already? He pictured her shaking with cold and terror in some awful Skinner idea of prison, a long way from the comforts of the Shaded’s base at Pentonville. He turned away from thoughts of miscarriage brought on by trauma. The body protecting itself by self-aborting. That would not happen. Becky was strong. She was resourceful. His spirits lifted when he considered that she might have escaped already.