White and Other Tales of Ruin

“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.

By the time we reached the end of the driveway and turned to see Ellie and Hayden watching us, I was sweating and exhausted. We had travelled about fifty metres.

Across the road lay the cliff path leading to Boris’s dismembered corpse. Charley glanced that way, perhaps wishing to look down upon her boyfriend one more time.

“Come on,” I said, clasping her elbow and heading away. She offered no resistance.