Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

Sadie had been intent on hiding from them behind the trees until they stopped their bickering, no more, but when she had heard men talking beyond the embankment she had decided to check them out in case they might be looking for Will. One of the strangers had spotted Sadie and was friendly, offering her chocolate. He was around Sadie’s age. The other man was older and was walking a docile-looking dog; he moved away when Sadie approached.

The boy, whose name was Jacob, was good-looking and Sadie had warmed to him. They talked for a while and Jacob asked if she would like to see a bird’s nest. It was then that she realised she might be missed and explained that she needed to go back. But the boy grabbed her arm and begged her to go with him. The man with the dog returned. The dog was no longer placid and scared her into going with them. They gave her something hot and sour to drink from a bottle without a label that made her feel dizzy. She remembered someone trying to pull her top up and she had struggled with him. He’d had a grope of her breasts and seemed to be satisfied with that. Then she had been being pushed into a caravan where she had fallen asleep on a sofa. Blankets that smelled of tar. Then nothing more until Will and the old woman found her.

“They’ll notice she’s gone,” the old woman said. “Won’t be long. You should be on your way soon.”

Elisabeth ignored her. “Are you all right?” she asked Sadie.

“Fine,” Sadie replied.

“No,” Elisabeth intoned, more firmly. “I mean, are you all right ?”

The old woman pursed her lips as she handed mugs of tea around. “If you mean, ‘Have they raped you?’, why not say?”

Elisabeth put her mug down. “We should go to the police about this,” she said. “Sadie was kidnapped. We don’t know what’s happened to her. She was drugged.”

“Your daughter was not raped.”

“She isn’t my–”

The old woman paid no attention. “She was not raped. I know my kind.”

“We’ll see about that. She was kidnapped, at any rate. There’ll be prison sentences in this, I promise you.”

The old woman rounded on her. “There’ll be death before there’s prison sentences, I promise you that, if you carry on with this nonsense.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Well what do you think it is? A brace of pheasants?”

Will moved, breaking the tension that was thickening in the cabin.

“Eli,” he said gently, “Nula helped us. She helped us. We should be grateful.”

“And what would have happened to her if we hadn’t come after her, Will? What then?”

Nula offered Elisabeth a thick slice of bread spread with margarine. Despite her hunger, she spurned it.

“She’d have come with us,” Nula said, re-directing the bread towards Will, who took it. “She’d have been safe with us.”

“Safe?” Elisabeth mocked. “Safe?”

Sadie stood up. Groggily, she said: “I’m okay. They didn’t touch me. I promise.”

Elisabeth closed her eyes. She felt close to tears. Regardless of her mistrust of the old woman, she didn’t want to go back out into the cold and dark. The cabin, though cluttered and musty, was at least warm. “Let’s get out,” she said.

THEY WALKED IN silence until they rejoined the railway line. Before dawn, they scattered, hiding in the bushes as three helicopters chattered low overhead, arc lights swooping over the embankment and the tracks.

“Do you think they’ll come after us, those people?” Will asked. “When they find that Sadie is gone?”

Elisabeth shook her head. “Not if they’ve any brains between them,” she said. Will’s reluctance to report the incident had refreshed the frost between them that had until that point been gradually thawing. At lunchtime, exhausted, Will conceded that if they weren’t to alert the authorities about the camp, they should at least treat themselves to a decent lunch for a change. It would be worth the risk. And after last night, he privately considered, he wasn’t bothered any more. What happened now didn’t matter.

Leaving Elisabeth and Sadie on the edge of a car park, Will, conscious of how soiled and grizzled he appeared, tramped along a road to a supermarket where he bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine without making eye contact with anybody. He wished he had enough money to enable them to take a train or a bus, one of which, cruelly, passed him as he made his way back to the car park, splashing him with some of the road’s surface water. The windows were misty with inner warmth; figures were black, lumpen, huddled into the enervation of their journeys.

Will could now see Elisabeth and Sadie perched on two small concrete bollards, talking, and the sight lanced him to the quick.

In the days leading up to Cat’s death, he had been imagining how the shape of his own baby might fill his hands. How the heat of it would travel through his fingers. He had imagined breathing the air that moved across its hot little head, and of what it might have smelled.

Being with Elisabeth too had re-opened in him a scar he thought long healed. The manner of their separation had always frustrated him. It had been avoidable, he knew, but neither he nor she had lifted a finger to arrest the slide. It was as though they had been fascinated by the speed of their decay, loath to prevent it in favour of observing something spectacular. From aisle to courtroom, their marriage had lasted three months. And for what? An imagined infidelity on her part; a suspicion on his that she had married him because he was the only person in her last-chance saloon at the time.

After the fallout (there had been much, and it had spread wide), Will had failed to come up with a satisfactory reason for their divorce. It was almost as if they had feared the dedication and commitment marriage demanded of them and had wimped out at the first opportunity. By then he had met Cat and was too involved to consider raking through the ashes to see if any embers remained.

“A feast,” he said cheerfully, as he rejoined them. Although he hadn’t said as much, he was mightily pleased to have Sadie back with them. Finding her in Fleece’s caravan, he had hugged her and told her how sorry he was. But then Fleece had entered, his arm and chest sodden with wet blood, and, upon seeing Will, had turned and hurried outside, tripping as he did so and winding himself on the ground.

“Wait here, just a second,” he had told Sadie and ran after Fleece. In the dark, before Fleece had a chance to muster the breath to call for help, Will knelt on his back and caught his chin between his hands. Summoning all of his strength, and thinking of Cat alone with those evil, evil bastards, he wrenched Fleece’s head back, relishing, yes, relishing the tear of muscles, the gullet’s collapse in a sound like that of disintegrating polystyrene, the crack of bone as his throat gave way. At the moment that Fleece went limp in his hands, a strange haze, like some glittering stage curtain, had manifested itself in front of (or was it behind?) his eyes. It threatened to part, but Will recoiled, jamming his hands against his eyes, inexplicably fearful of what he might see. He had dragged the body fully three hundred yards, into a scrim of gorse, and kicked loose dust at the corpse until its shape was sufficiently concealed.

And then the old woman, scurrying through the dark, her Wellington boots scuffing across the ground. Bringing him out of it.

Sadie and Elisabeth wolfed their food and traded secretive glances as they ate. At one point they laughed out loud. Will, his gut full of food, picking crumbs from his jumper and in as good a mood as any since leaving the farmhouse, asked them about the joke they were sharing.

“Don’t look now,” Sadie said, “but look behind you.”