What heat the fire provides is negated by icy drafts sneaking in through broken windows and the gaps beneath doors. I wrap my arms around myself to try to keep warm and look around at the six other people here with me.
A large, straw-haired woman (Jill, I think, one of the work gang leaders) eventually gets up and makes hot drinks, which she hands around in chipped mugs. The wood on the fire crackles and pops as it burns. The chimney’s blocked, and the house is filling with smoke.
“There’ll be food in the square outside the hotel later,” she says. “It won’t be much, but it should help keep the cold out.”
“What about tomorrow?” the man with the tape-repaired specs and the comb-over asks, sitting opposite, leaning back against the wall.
“No work here,” she answers, “but Warner will find you something. There’s always the fields.”
“This place is well organized,” I say to her, taking advantage of a natural gap in the conversation to try to push for information again.
“You just arrived?”
“Got here this morning.”
“Then you might want to think about staying. You’ll not find anything better around here. You’ll probably not find anything better anywhere.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because John Warner’s a good man. Because the things he’s planning are going to give people like us our lives back.”
“People like us?”
“People who don’t want to keep fighting for everything,” she explains. “The war’s over, and it’s time to start picking up the pieces. Time to stop all the killing and start remembering what it’s like to be human again.”
She’s obviously never been to Lowestoft, I think to myself, trying not to smirk at the thought. I suddenly feel like I’ve wandered into a hippie commune from the sixties. Thing is, peace and love and all that bullshit never really counted for much, and as far as I can see, they count for absolutely nothing now. Remorse, compassion, regret … publicly demonstrate any of those emotions and you’re likely to get torn apart. Give someone an inch, and they’ll take ten miles. Hold your hand out to help someone, and some nasty bastard will tear your arm off and beat you to death with the bloody limb. That’s how it is in the rest of the world outside Southwold, anyway. Everyone I’ve so far seen is stuck in a rut—no one wants to go back to the lives they had before, but there are no new roles or routines for people to move into. The violence that brought us all to this point has become the norm.
“So how’s Warner planning to change things, then?” I ask, genuinely curious. “By making you bury bodies? By getting people to plow fields where nothing’s ever gonna grow?”
She shakes her head angrily. “If you don’t like it, just fuck off.”
“It’s not that,” the silver-haired pit digger I spoke to earlier says from another corner of the room. “Warner’s just trying to pick the pieces up again and restore some order. It’s not so much what we’re doing, the important thing is the fact we’re doing it at all.”
“Sorry,” I say quickly, backpedaling fast and realizing that publicly bad-mouthing Warner was a stupid move, “I didn’t mean to sound so critical. It’s just that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything like this. This is the first place I’ve been in weeks where people aren’t constantly at each other’s throats.”
“We’ve all done more than our fair share of that,” Jill says quietly, swirling the dregs of her drink around in the bottom of her mug, then knocking it back, “and chances are we’ll all have to fight again someday.”
“You don’t always have a choice,” someone else says, his face hidden by the darkness.
“There’s always a choice,” Jill says. “That’s what John’ll tell you.”
There’s an underlying tension and emotion in this woman’s voice that I didn’t expect. Am I the only one who’s picking up on it? She sounds like she genuinely supports Warner and believes in what he’s doing, whatever that might be. I guess the fact she’s here at all is proof that Warner’s chosen not to echo Hinchcliffe’s “management model.” Were she in Lowestoft, unless she was a particularly strong fighter or had a particular skill that Hinchcliffe needed, she’d most likely have been swallowed up with the rest of the underclass, not assuming any position of authority or worth. Could this place and its leader actually be for real? I’m still not convinced. How can Warner find enough food to feed around thirty people regularly when most people can’t even feed themselves?
“Someone I passed on the road said something about another settlement? A little farther up the coast from here?”
“That’ll be Lowestoft.”
“What’s it like there?”
“Don’t rightly know,” she answers quickly, “and I don’t want to know, either. Warner talks to the people in charge up there when he has to, but he ain’t got a lot of time for them. We keep our distance. He says they’re going about things the wrong way.”
“How so?”
“What’s your name, friend?”
“Rufus,” I reply, remembering at the last second that I used a false name when I arrived this morning.
“You ask a lot of questions,” she says. That’s the second time I’ve been warned today. I need to make it the last time, too.
“Sorry. I’ve been on my own for too long. I’m just looking for somewhere to stop for a while, and if I’ll get a better deal here than in Lowestoft, then—”
“It’s not about deals,” she interrupts angrily. “That’s the difference between us here and them up there. We’re small enough and sensible enough to work together. Up in Lowestoft Hinchcliffe keeps people dangling on pieces of string. He uses them. Tempts them with promises and stuff, then gets rid of them when they don’t do what he says. He’s the only one who benefits. It might work for him, but he’s a bastard, and we don’t want that here.”
“Sounds bad.”
“It is bad. Fighting has replaced thinking, if you hadn’t already noticed—and until people start thinking again, we’re all in trouble.”
I drink more coffee to stop myself from speaking, sensing that I’ve pushed as far as I dare. She’s absolutely right about Hinchcliffe, and I’m precisely the kind of person she was talking about, sitting here in the cold and being manipulated by him from a distance while he sits in the relative comfort of his courthouse throne room. What choice do I have? Are things really any better here? Is Warner as honest and decent as she’s making him out to be? I doubt he is. I don’t think anyone really gives a damn about anyone else anymore. I certainly don’t. My gut feeling is still that Warner must be profiting from this somehow. Whatever he’s doing, he’s playing with fire. I wouldn’t want to risk doing anything that might piss Hinchcliffe off unless I had a foolproof contingency plan and an untraceable escape route mapped out first.
“I’m off,” Jill says suddenly, getting up and walking toward the door. “Got things to do. See you all later.”
Now my paranoia is going into overdrive. Have I said too much and is she going to see Warner to rat on me? Is it time to get out of here? I wait for a moment longer, staring into the embers of the fire, then glance up and see that the man with the comb-over and broken glasses is watching me from across the room. He looks away as soon as we make eye contact, and I know that I’ve aroused suspicions. I’ll shut up and keep to myself from now on. They’ll be watching me now. Despite all the bullshit I’ve just heard, I know that like everywhere else, no one here trusts anyone else.
11
THE WOMAN JILL WAS right about the food—it was warm and it was limited, both in taste and volume. I forced myself to eat, knowing that I needed to build up my energy after the unexpected exertion of the day. I never expected to have to do a full day’s physical labor here. Every muscle in my body hurts now and I feel half dead, even worse than usual.
I’ve been trying to walk off the food lying heavy on my stomach, determined not to spend another night
