White and Other Tales of Ruin

tended to agree. Personal. She didn’t want to get personal, and I could understand and empathise. What was happening here was way too internalised to get involved with someone just because they happened to be sitting across the aisle. Even the voice came from inside, as if I was actually hearing it somewhere else and only its meaning was being understood here.

“I’m so sorry about your son,” I said, and she averted her eyes and looked at the black window.

I leaned forward and picked up a bottle of water, changed my mind and popped the seal on a beer. The bottleneck widened and a head developed, and I took my first frothy mouthful, sighing at the synthesised real ale taste. I still didn’t know how they managed it, but it was perfect.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back in the seat. Laura surprised me and ran across my memory, laughing as a six year old and leaping on Janine’s back just months before my wife died. I remembered the day vividly. I remembered being depressed and miserable and non-communicative, because both Janine and I knew that she was dying and there was nothing we could do. Fate had done that, to Janine and to me, and I hated it. I hated that Laura would grow up without a mother. And I took out my hate on both of them, because there was nothing and no one else to suffer it.

Reliving the memory, I knew that I should have relished that moment, every moment, not lived in a haze of hate. I saw Laura’s eyes as she leapt on Janine, Janine’s smile as she caught our daughter, and I realised for the first time that my wife was as happy then as she had ever been. Her smile was not for Laura’s sake, nor for mine. It was genuine. A true statement of joy. I should have been a part of that, not apart from it.

I opened my eyes and I was crying. I wiped at the tears and took another swig of beer, and it didn’t taste as good. That was the trouble with artificiality — it could never maintain a constant. Like memories it was only an approximation of the truth.

“My daughter has been taken away by a religious sect,” I said. “I don’t know where she is and I may never get her back.”

“At least she’s alive,” the woman said.

I thought about this, wondering just how we were supposed to take this journey as a healing exercise when we could still talk. “I’m sure your son still loved you, even at the end. My Laura will have been brainwashed to forget me. Love has no place in the sects… not for anything outside, at least.”

The woman didn’t respond and I said no more. I finished my beer, each mouthful more rancid, and then I opened one of the meal containers and ate salmon in white wine sauce. It was real salmon. It melted in my mouth and released the sterile taste of mass produced fish that had never swum in a river, never known rapids. A smaller container held a slab of apple pie and custard, but once opened I could not bring myself to eat.

I suddenly felt bad, being able to eat and drink after what I had just seen. The scenes outside looked so very real. They smelled and sounded totally genuine. I’d just seen dozens of people dead and dying, and I was ready to sit back and drink bad beer and eat salmon. I looked around guiltily, but the woman across the aisle was chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of something, and from the seat before me I could hear the unmistakeable sounds of eating and drinking. I glanced across at the woman again and caught her wry smile.

“I wonder what’s next,” someone said from further along the coach. Their voice was muffled and dull, and I wondered just how large this vehicle was. I shifted in my seat but the straps held tight, as if aware of my sudden interest in looking around.

“Titanic,” someone answered, their voice even quieter. “I’ve always wanted to see the Titanic going down.”

“Natural disasters make for good viewing,” the first voice said. “Give me a hurricane or earthquake over a war or riot any day.”

Be patient and you will see, said the voice in my head, and it must have spoken to everyone because silence fell once more.

There was a sense of movement as we were transferred from one scene to the next, but I could not tell how fast we were travelling. It wasn’t like a ship, or a hover train, or an aircraft, because there were no sounds at all to indicate that we were passing along rails or through air turbulence. The sense came from inside? an occasional dipping of the stomach or a twinge in my inner ear. I wondered how far we were travelling and just how big Hell may be, when the windows brightened once again and I was faced with the answer.

Hell was huge. If it had boundaries they were scores of miles apart, at least. It had sky, and land, and dazzling sunlight. And when it came to pain, suffering and death… it knew no boundaries.

Perhaps even now Laura was being lectured in the traditional Hell, the metaphysical place where wrongdoers suffered and punishments were meted out, and where Satan presided over his flung-down domain, plotting vengeance, scheming to re-attain his rightful place amongst the angels. But however thorough her brainwashing at the hands of the cult, they could never show her this. If she were here with me now, then she’d believe. Then she’d know that Hell is of our own making, and we have been manufacturing and perpetuating it on our own planet ever since we crawled from the primeval swamp. The place I travelled through was simply a bringing together, a distillation of all bad things.

I looked from the window and felt sick.

Be glad you aren’t here, the voice purred, and I began to cry.

The coach was moving slowly, painfully slowly, across a wide open plain. In the distance a row of snow- capped mountains pointed at the sky like a giant bottom jaw. The top jaw was a line of dense strato-cumulus clouds hanging threateningly across the whole horizon, waiting to close at any moment and bite the scene away. The plain itself, for as far as I could see, writhed and flickered and shifted in and out of focus, and at first I thought my tears were distorting trees and bushes and setting them moving. But I wiped at my eyes again, pressed my face to the window with my breath held… and I saw that the movement was people.

The whole plain, every spare spread of ground, was smothered with humanity. Hunkered under trees, sitting on the sides of small hillocks, hiding beneath tarpaulins or coats pinned to upright sticks, staring up into the sky or scrabbling around in the dust for food, adults drinking from deflated water bags and children hanging onto sagging breasts, bodies coughing blood, eyes leaking blood, mouths gushing blood as people fell to their knees and vomited, some rushing to their aid but trying not to get too close, living-dead wrapping corpses in dirty clothes and men digging long burial pits, the wrappers scratching at sores on their arms, the diggers wiping bloody red from their eyes, birds sweeping down to peck morsels from bodies left out too long after death, and sometimes from those so weakened that they could not wave the birds away, could not save their eyes or testicles or dignity in the few moments they had left in this world before passing painfully into the next…

I gasped out loud and heard similar sounds from around the coach. Even the man in front of me, all but silent and dismissive in his invisibility until now, muttered something under his breath that may have been a prayer.

And then the sounds and smells made it in from outside, and I knew that there was always worse.

Moans, cries, the stench of shit, rot, sighs, screams, muttered desperation, food gone-off, vomit, vomiting, fresh exhortations from a new volunteer helper, the disbelieving mumbles from the thousands who had seen it all before. They knew that nothing and no one could help. I saw a gaggle of nuns threading their way through the hundreds of acres of dead and dying humanity, and I almost laughed at their blind devotion and foolish belief that anything could ever be any different. One of them would stop every now and then, bend down, cross herself and a bundle of rags on the floor before moving on. I wondered how many of them would be alive next week, and how many black and white habits were already hugging corpses in the ground.

We passed by a burial pit. As ever, the diggers did not look our way? we were not there, so there was nothing for them to see? and I had an uninterrupted view of the hundreds of bodies piled at one end. The digging could not keep up with the dying, and even as corpses were wound in old cloth or sacking and flung into the pit, the mountain they had been taken from grew.

There had been people vomiting and leaking blood, but this close to so many dead I could see how extreme their affliction was. Something hissed inside the coach and the odour was suddenly beaten back by a sweet perfume, but I still got an idea of how bad this would smell, how awful the stench of rotting family and friends could be. There was so much blood. The bodies had bled out, their fluids leaving through existing holes and new ones alike. Stomachs were split, chests ruptured, noses rotted away, eyes pushed out of their sockets by the explosive pressure of blood seeking release. I’d heard about Ebola Zaire and Marburg, but this looked so much worse, even more violent than those nightmare viruses. A sheet of flies lifted from the corpses as if flicked at one end, swung