Chapter 9
Two to four
Cat was always clever, but I now think perhaps never more so than in the way she dealt with the bewildering explosion of new things that the girls’ arrival blew into our lives.
And it really was like an explosion rather than just an arrival, because it left us both shock-blasted and suddenly unmoored from the predictable normality anchoring us in our previously undisturbed world.
In the first moments and hours my mind began to stutter in a woozily disorienting way, alternately freezing in shock at the abruptness and violence of it all, and then lurching forwards, racing with fear so badly that I could feel myself losing the ability to do anything.
This went on for days. Cat must have been equally stunned, but her mind was always stronger than mine I think, and she knew the best way for me and probably for both of us not to continue spinning out of control with the shock and fear of it all was to keep doing the simple things that just needed doing.
I’m pretty sure she intuitively knew that all this was too big to cope with there on the spot, in the immediate aftermath of everything, but that it’d be best to do something, however small, if only to be busy – to think with our hands as she always called it.
I can remember her attitude even more clearly than the details of what we did, some of which are sharp, some of which are so far beyond blurred that they are lost completely.
It’s all still too much of a tangled snarl in my head for me to ever cleanly straighten out, but I do remember exactly how she naturally took command like always, as she stood over the body in the nettles.
I remember it like I’m still there, stuck in that moment.
We’ve got to do something about this, she says.
What are we going to do with it? I say.
She grimaces briskly and then looks around, as if something her eye falls on will give her the idea she’s reaching for, the lifebelt to keep us afloat amid these newly choppy and uncharted waters in which we now seem in real danger of drowning.
I’m watching her because she’s familiar and I’m still finding it hard to look at the body or the pale girls.
We have to do something, I say. We can’t just leave it.
Of course we can’t, she says. I know that, Mouse.
The dog pushes past my leg and goes over to the man.
A couple of sniffs at his boots and it loses interest, turning away to sniff at a small hole in a more interesting pile of earth and moss stacked up against the broken kerb, which it starts pulling apart with its front paws, back hunched in excitement.
What’s it doing? I say.
Digging, Cat says. Probably smelled the mouse.
If it was a mouse hole, there’s no mouse home, and the dog gives up after a few deep inhalations to confirm. It doesn’t seem to mind and trots away to see what’s on the other side of the nettles, leaving us to contemplate the dead man undisturbed.
What did they used to do with bodies? I say. Should we burn it?
I didn’t want to burn it. As soon as I said it I could smell the roasting flesh and imagine how bad it would sound, fat popping and sizzling like meat in a pan.
Or bury it? I say quickly. Despite myself, I look down and catch a glimpse of the side of his face, still frozen in his own moment of surprise.
Him, I mean, I say. Bury him. We should bury him.
I didn’t want to bury him either, to tell the truth.
We had one spade with a really wobbly handle, and were presently on the lookout for a replacement whenever we went scavenging.
It was annoying to dig with, and though we repeatedly mended it, it was definitely on the point of breaking again.
And digging is just always hard work. I already felt all the energy had drained out of me.
I had the strangest longing to just curl up and go to sleep, which clearly wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Yes, she said. We’ll bury him. But not close.
We could put him in the graveyard, I said, by the church. You know, probably good to do it among the other graves…
It seemed like a logical enough idea when I thought it, but as I watched Cat’s head shake in disbelief, I realised it sounded strange and desperate, somehow.
That’s a mile away, she says. Do you want to drag him a mile just so he has company he won’t know anything about?
No, I say. Course not. That’d be a stupid reason. But I don’t want to have him in the ground somewhere we walk past every day. What I did… I don’t want to keep being reminded of it—
You’re not going to forget it, Little Mouse, she said, mouth twitched lopsided in a sudden, sad half-smile. Nor am I. But you’re right. We should put him somewhere we already don’t like to go.
Like the miserable wood? I say.
Like the quarry, she says. After we get them settled and warm.
The first time the girls saw the Bunker, Storm’s eyes went wide and she just stopped on the threshold and stared.
Freya didn’t react much. Her eyes had gone back to focusing on something deep inside herself again, but I remember Storm’s reaction very clearly.
If you live in the same place for a long time, it’s as if you stop seeing it, maybe because you know where everything is.
For us the Bunker was just home, constant as the sun outside.
The girls of course had never seen it before, and I watched Storm’s face as she tried to make sense of the big space beyond the narrow front door.
For me their faces were the new things because I’d only ever really seen Cat’s face before that.
I mean I know I saw my mother’s, obviously, and I desperately wish I did remember it, but I was too young when the strangers from the sea came ashore with the coughing.
Cat’s face was the one I knew, the one I knew how to read.
The emotions she let play across it were a bit like theirs, but actually a lot different.
As I watched Storm especially, I began to see our familiar space through her eyes and so found myself seeing it fresh.
The Bunker’s not really just a shelter. Originally it was built as a place in which to hide an airplane, not a big one for carrying passengers, but a smaller fighter plane kept there for wars that never happened.
It’s a concrete box buried in a mound of earth, facing what used to be a runway but is now so overgrown that it’s a solid half-mile strip of blackberry bush we call the Tanglewood.
We know the Bunker was built as a fighter plane garage because there are seven other identical bunkers around the old runway, and four of them still have the drooping skeletons of their planes rotting away inside them.
They stand perched on narrow legs and the bare metal knuckles of wheel rims from which tyres have rotted away, looking like birds that died too proud to lie down.
It’s from one of them that someone took a pilot seat and dragged it all the way to the top of the Tower.
There are also underground tanks that once held fuel for the planes, at least that’s what we can make out from the corroded signs riveted to the access hatches.
We opened one and it smelled so chemically that Cat closed it again and decided we shouldn’t open the rest of them because there was no point knowing if they were full or empty as we couldn’t use a torch to look into the dark cavern behind the hatch to see if it was full, in case we ignited the chemical smelling gas and triggered an explosion with the flame of the torch.
The Bunker, our bunker is different to all that.
Less military, more homey. Someone re-purposed it long before we were born.
The front door, the one we use as a main door, is person-sized, but once you walk out of the narrow passage cut through the earth mound beyond, you find yourself in a wide, high-ceilinged cavern of space, facing the old real front door of the hangar, high and wide enough to drive a jet through.
The old hangar doors have gone and been replaced with a glass wall jumbled together from mismatched window frames cannibalised from deserted houses, a giant patchwork window that looks out on an entanglement of briars three times the height of a person.
Those brambles used to press grimly against the windowpanes and block most of the light until we decided to hack them back one spring before they bulked up with leaves again.
We made a strip four paces wide that let the light in much better and stopped the noise of the thorns scraping the glass in high winds, which used to keep us awake at night.
The window was a mosaic of smaller, different-sized windows all jammed together, and each made a different kind of noise as the thorns scraped on them in the wind, so you could never really get used to the sound in a storm.
In the depths of night there was always the feeling that one of those noises could be something you didn’t want to meet trying to get in.
Some of the windows were broken and had wood where the glass had once been, and they acted like drumskins, adding a rat-tat-tatting to the scraping on the glass.