White and Other Tales of Ruin

Brand shook his head.

“We’ve got to do something,” Rosalie said, “we can’t just sit here while Boris is lying dead out there.”

Ellie said nothing. The telephone hissed its amusement. Rosalie looked to me. “There’s nothing we can do,” I said. “Really, there’s not much to collect up. If we did bring his… bits… back here, what would we do?”

“Bury…” Rosalie began.

“Three feet of snow? Frozen ground?”

“And the things,” Brand said. The phone cackled again and he turned it off.

“What things?”

Brand looked around our small group. “The things Boris said he’d seen.”

Boris had mentioned nothing to me. In our long, drunken talks, he had never talked of any angels in the snow. Upstairs, I’d thought that it was simply Charley drunk and mad with grief, but now Brand had said it too I had the distinct feeling I was missing out on something. I was irked, and upset at feeling irked.

“Things?” Rosalie said, and I closed my eyes. Oh fuck, don’t tell her, I willed at Brand. She’d regale us with stories of secret societies and messages in the clouds, disease-makers who were wiping out the inept and the crippled, the barren and the intellectually inadequate. Jayne had been sterile, so we’d never had kids. The last thing I needed was another one of Rosalie’s mad ravings about how my wife had died, why she’d died, who had killed her.

Luckily, Brand seemed of like mind. Maybe the joint he’d lit up had stewed him into silence at last. He turned to the fire and stared into its dying depths, sitting on the edge of the seat as if wondering whether or not to feed it some more. The stack of logs was running low.

“Things?” Rosalie said again, nothing if not persistent.

“No things,” I said. “Nothing.” I left the room before it all flared up.

In the kitchen I opened another can, carefully this time, and poured it into a tall glass. I stared into creamy depths as bubbles passed up and down. It took a couple of minutes for the drink to settle, and in that time I had recalled Jayne’s face, her body, the best times we’d had together. At my first sip, a tear replenished the glass.

That night I heard doors opening and closing as someone wandered between beds. I was too tired to care who.

The next morning I half expected it to be all better. I had the bitter taste of dread in my mouth when I woke up, but also a vague idea that all the bad stuff could only have happened in nightmares. As I dressed — two shirts, a heavy pullover, a jacket — I wondered what awaited me beyond my bedroom door.

In the kitchen Charley was swigging from a fat mug of tea. It steamed so much, it seemed liable to burn whatever it touched. Her lips were red-raw, as were her eyes. She clutched the cup tightly, knuckles white, thumbs twisted into the handle. She looked as though she wanted to never let it go.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw her. I glanced out of the window and saw the landscape of snow, added to yet again the previous night, bloated flakes still fluttering down to reinforce the barricade against our escape. Somewhere out there, Boris’s parts were frozen memories hidden under a new layer.

“Okay?” I said quietly.

Charley looked up at me as if I’d farted at her mother’s funeral. “Of course I’m not okay,” she said, enunciating each word carefully. “And what do you care?”

I sat at the table opposite her, yawning, rubbing hands through my greasy hair, generally trying to disperse the remnants of sleep. There was a pot of tea on the table and I took a spare mug and poured a steaming brew. Charley watched my every move. I was aware of her eyes upon me, but I tried not to let it show. The cup shook, I could barely grab a spoon. I’d seen her boyfriend splashed across the snow, I felt terrible about it, but then I realised that she’d seen the same scene. How bad must she be feeling?

“We have to do something,” she said.

“Charley — ”

“We can’t just sit here. We have to go. Boris needs a funeral. We have to go and find someone, get out of this God-forsaken place. There must be someone near, able to help, someone to look after us? I need someone to look after me.”

The statement was phrased as a question, but I ventured no answer.

“Look,” she said, “we have to get out. Don’t you see?” She let go of her mug and clasped my hands; hers were hot and sweaty. “The village, we can get there, I know we can.”

“No, Charley,” I said, but I did not have a chance to finish my sentence (there’s no way out, we tried, and didn’t you see the television reports weeks ago?) before Ellie marched into the room. She paused when she saw Charley, then went to the cupboard and poured herself a bowl of cereal. She used water. We’d run out of milk a week ago.

“There’s no telephone,” she said, spooning some soggy corn flakes into her mouth. “No television, save some flickering pictures most of us don’t want to see. Or believe. There’s no radio, other than the occasional foreign channel. Rosie says she speaks French. She’s heard them talking of ‘the doom’. That’s how she translates it, though I think it sounds more like ‘the ruin’. The nearest village is ten miles away. We have no motorised transport that will even get out of the garage. To walk it would be suicide.” She crunched her limp breakfast, mixing in more sugar to give some taste.

Charley did not reply. She knew what Ellie was saying, but tears were her only answer.

“So we’re here until the snow melts,” I said. Ellie really was a straight bitch. Not a glimmer of concern for Charley, not a word of comfort.

Ellie looked at me and stopped chewing for a moment. “I think until it does melt, we’re protected.” She had a way of coming out with ideas that both enraged me, and scared the living shit out of me at the same time.

Charley could only cry.

Later, three of us decided to try to get out. In moments of stress, panic and mourning, logic holds no sway.

I said I’d go with Brand and Charley. It was one of the most foolish decisions I’ve ever made, but seeing Charley’s eyes as she sat in the kitchen on her own, thinking about her slaughtered boyfriend, listening to Ellie go on about how hopeless it all was… I could not say no. And in truth, I was as desperate to leave as anyone.

It was almost ten in the morning when we set out.

Ellie was right, I knew that even then. Her face as she watched us struggle across the garden should have brought me back straight away: she thought I was a fool. She was the last person in the world I wanted to appear foolish in front of, but still there was that nagging feeling in my heart that pushed me on — a mixture of desire to help Charley and a hopeless feeling that by staying here, we were simply waiting for death to catch us up.

It seemed to have laid its shroud over the rest of the world already. Weeks ago the television had shown some dreadful sights: people falling ill and dying in their thousands; food riots in London; a nuclear exchange between Greece and Turkey. More, lots more, all of it bad. We’d known something was coming — things had been falling apart for years — but once it began it was a cumulative effect, speeding from a steady trickle toward decline, to a raging torrent. We’re better off where we are, Boris had said to me. It was ironic that because of him, we were leaving.

I carried the shotgun. Brand had an air pistol, though I’d barely trust him with a sharpened stick. As well as being loud and brash, he spent most of his time doped to the eyeballs. If there was any trouble, I’d be watching out for him as much as anything else.

Something had killed Boris and whatever it was, animal or human, it was still out there in the snow. Moved on, hopefully, now it had fed. But then again perhaps not. It did not dissuade us from trying.

The snow in the manor garden was almost a metre deep. The three of us had botched together snow shoes of varying effectiveness. Brand wore two snapped-off lengths of picture frame on each foot, which seemed to act more as knives to slice down through the snow than anything else. He was tenaciously pompous; he struggled with his mistake rather than admitting it. Charley had used two frying pans with their handles snapped off, and she seemed to be making good headway. My own creations consisted of circles of mounted canvas cut from the redundant artwork in the manor. Old owners of the estate stared up at me through the snow as I repeatedly stepped on their faces.