He didn’t know how long he had been sleeping, as the light in the room was unchanged when he awoke. Will fumbled his father’s wristwatch off the crate standing on its end by the cot to make a bedside table, which told him it was two o’clock in the afternoon and he’d been asleep for five hours. The Major wouldn’t expect him to be up for another hour, but he felt rested, if stiff from having spent last night’s watch cramped in one position for so long.
The room was empty, but he could hear a faint murmur of voices coming from the radio room next door. He didn’t have clearance to go in there without an invitation or an emergency, so he allowed himself another five minutes of rest while he speculated what the Major might have for him to do that night. The pattern of his shifts hadn’t changed for two weeks straight – lurk, observe, take notes of not very much. So far as he could see, nothing had happened in that time that would mean the mission was closer to being completed.
Hopefully, whatever it was would get him out of the bunker, and not just for observation duty. It was hard going being in such confined and windowless quarters for longer than it took to eat, sleep and, occasionally, wash. The small complex buried in the gardens of Bodingleigh House had been built during World War II as a failsafe in case of a successful invasion and had not been designed for comfort. The radio operators stationed in the grand, mock-Gothic manor house would have decamped to the bunker to carry out covert acts of communication and sabotage, in concert with others stationed at strategic points around the country, and thus achieved victory.
Perhaps because it had never been called into use, it had fallen out of public awareness in the village. It was Will who had rediscovered it, having crashed through an open escape hatch while trespassing to climb trees, in the weeks before his parents took him away. Until he passed on news of its existence, SCREW had a much riskier plan to use an abandoned barn on the estate. The bunker was perfect for their needs; despite a century of neglect, it remained largely intact.
Will first learned about World War II from old Mrs P’s lessons. From what he had read in the tattered books in her classroom, shared with unruly neighbours and their sharp elbows, he could be excused for thinking that history had ended then. For one thing, fashions in Devon had barely changed. The men and women in the old black-and-white photos looked indistinguishable from the adults he saw every day, men dressed in homespun woollens and women in home-sewn dresses and imported nylon housecoats.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Saltash that he realised anyone could wear another colour besides black, navy or brown, and not until he entered basic training as soon as he turned sixteen that he discovered what winning the war had meant in terms of losing the battle with the climate before anyone outside of a scientific and industrial elite even knew there was a battle to be fought. In classes in old Nissen huts, together with the rest of SCREW’s newest volunteers, he had learned another story: of how a frugal generation, brought up under rationing and brutalised by horrors that had to be borne with a stiff upper lip, had been rejected by their children. How a habit of empire had persisted as the old order was remade and maps redrawn, and globalised markets had metastasised the canker of extreme neo-liberalism across the world and turned a diverse planetary ecology into one malignant shopping centre dominated by multinationals.
He had to admit – to himself, he wouldn’t dare say it to anyone else – to being jealous that he hadn’t been alive in a time when you could order anything you wanted, so long as you had cash or access to credit, and have it delivered to you the next day. The way it was described, it sounded like magic. It seemed so unfair, for his generation, that they were lucky to get a new, scratchy home-knitted sweater or socks for Christmas or birthdays and had to work so hard. Life was much better in Cornwall – and, he was told, the rest of the country – than it had been in Devon. It was still harder for generations born since the turn of the millennium than it had been for the previous two.
It was harder to admit, even to himself, that he was still a bit seduced by the glamour of the wartime story absorbed in childhood. The simple narrative of good versus evil, played out in the black-and-white films watched on the school projector, using a generator reserved for special occasions only, held the warm glow of nostalgia and the comfort of certainty. But then he would remember where the fuel for the generator came from, and how the Nazi regime used the fat of slaughtered concentration-camp victims, and feel a bit sick that harvesting still happened, even if the victims were now living.
The bunker was far enough underground to be soundproof. Escape tunnels and hatches in case of discovery, ventilation ducts and tubes containing wiring, riddled the surrounding hillside in a complicated circulatory system. It also had a very basic toilet and shower supplied by a tank fed with rainwater. All of this was news to Will, who had been primarily interested in the fact he had a secret place to go to be sure of being alone and had told none of his friends or family about his discovery. His sisters were a pain, and his parents too caught up in their dispute with the Council; home had been a place of fraught conversations held in low voices behind closed doors. And then weeks later he was gone, and memories of the bunker had faded in the excitement of new impressions and experiences. It wasn’t until after finishing training and volunteering to be posted back to Bodingleigh that he remembered the bunker and realised how useful it could be to SCREW.
It also had its original radio room. Devoid of equipment, it did retain a full set of switch panels, reconnected once the Major had broken into an abandoned military museum in Dartmouth and appropriated the kit they would need to keep in touch with other cells of activists while they coordinated strategy. The upper echelons of the resistance had satellite phones, but they were expensive and could be more easily monitored and tracked. Radio was safer.
With nothing to do but wait, Will made himself useful by putting a pan of water on the cooker to boil. By the time the door to the radio room opened the tea was brewed, using up another precious tea bag. The liquid he poured out was barely brown, but tea-making was more of a symbolic act in the bunker.
The Major came out carrying a folder, closing the door carefully behind him. He stretched and rubbed his neck, running his hand through already untidy hair. He was wearing the unofficial uniform of all SCREW activists – tough black jacket and trousers with plenty of pockets, without insignia. From a distance they could be mistaken for militia.
’Ah, Will, good.’ He accepted the mug Will offered him and yawned. ‘We’ll be having a briefing in half an hour. I’d get yourself something to eat while you can, you’re going to be busy tonight.’
Through the closed door, Will could hear a female voice speaking, relaying information up the line. His stomach fluttered; he was far too excited to eat.
The woman who emerged from the radio room half an hour later was unknown to Will, though her face tugged at his memory. The Major introduced her as Mrs Mason, which Will assumed wasn’t her real name. She was short, in her thirties and pretty, with long dark hair coiled on top of her head, dressed in a knee-length housedress and a nondescript and lumpy cardigan; if he’d seen her outside of this setting he would have pegged her as a wife and mother, happy in the home. Possibly a Door Knocker; not a resistance fighter. Until she raised her eyes from the notepad she handed to the Major and he was caught in a steely gaze that sliced to his core. He was sure she could tell what he had been thinking. His own eyes dropped as he mumbled a greeting.
They gathered around the central table. The Major cleared away old mugs and plates, grabbed a map from the stack tottering on shelves to his side and unrolled it, reclaiming a couple of mugs to hold it down. While he was sorting out his papers, the code knock sounded on the door.
‘Ah, good, bang on time. Let them in, Will.’
These faces were more familiar. Tom, Dick and Harriet, code names the Major seemed to find amusing; two young men and a younger girl Will had trained with in Cornwall, who had connections locally and had been hidden by sympathisers in neighbouring villages. They crowded in and removed damp outer layers, adding to the moist fug in the air.
‘Right, gather round, no time for chit-chat. We can do tea and biccies when you’re briefed. Will, I’m relying on you to brief Mal. He’ll be our liaison here tomorrow night, fielding communications, but he’s on watch now.’
Four young faces gazed at the Major expectantly. Mrs Mason clearly knew what was coming. She leaned back a bit and it looked like she was fanning away some of the closeness in the air.
‘We’ve been working towards this for years, ever since Spight started farming our people for fuel, hoarding food and using it to control the county, clinging to obsolete ways of thinking – exploiting weakness, greed and irrational fears to keep everyone under his thumb. Well, tomorrow’s the night we start the fight back, and you five are key to our success ...’
In her dreams she is light, floating. Faint breezes blow, wafting her here and there, not letting her touch the ground for more than a moment at a time. Warmth suffuses her, a bubble of laughter forms in her belly and …
Pain. All of her hurt. Light stabbed through her closed eyelids, but she couldn't turn away, held immobile by pain. Primrose’s eyes blinked open and she squinted in the bright sunlight falling through the window.
She'd survived then. She didn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved. Sooner or later, she was sure, she would slip away while she lay there on a slab like a beached whale and they sucked up all that was useful of her, her departure unnoticed as they gathered all the blubber and carried it off to turn it into fuel.
But not today.
She was lying in an awkward position, halfway down the bed. Maybe Dorcas hadn't had the help she needed to prop her up. The girl moved her arms, preparing to lever herself upright, but it provoked an additional rip of agony and she fell back awkwardly. She looked down and saw grubby bandages wrapped around both arms, from wrist to shoulder. More bandages wrapped her body, from her chest down to where she disappeared beneath the sheet. Pulling the sheet up, she saw bandages continuing all the way down her legs.
Underneath the bandages there seemed to be a lot less of her. And what was left, all of it, hurt.
They'd taken it all. Not just her stomach, which she'd expected, but legs and arms, hips, bum and boobs. She felt her face, wincing as she moved her arms. Even her chins were gone.
Primrose screamed with shock.
‘Hurts, don’t it?’ Alise was sitting up in her own bed, munching on home-made shortbread, dressed in one of the enormous surgical gowns Dorcas had requisitioned from a hospital, that made it less of a chore for her staff to wash the inmates. It gaped, and crumbs dropped into her ample cleavage. She plucked them out and licked them daintily from her finger. ‘You’d think we’d get used to it, but hurts like a bitch every time.’
‘What’s all the commotion about?’ Dorcas bustled through the door, red-faced from running up the stairs.
Grief and agony clogged Primrose’s throat; she couldn’t speak. The best she could manage was a wail.
‘It hurts,’ Alise explained, using a thumb to indicate Primrose.
‘Well, there’s no need to make such a fuss! Of course it’ll be a bit uncomfortable for a while. I’ll go get something to help, and we’ll start some compression going when I have a minute. Then I’ll get you something to eat. You’ve been out for two days, you must be starved.’
Uncomfortable? Was she crazy? Slumped and twisted, feeling diminished, all Primrose could do was weep.
Groomed for the farm from a young age, Primrose had been picked out from her six siblings as the one who might fulfil her parents’ ambitions to escape the poverty that blighted their neighbours, the village, the whole of the devolved county of Devon. Distracted by constant, gnawing hunger, made worse by the hours of housework she did every afternoon, Primrose didn’t notice at first that her portions at dinner had become larger; that she was the only one to get extra treats of dripping, biscuits or honey in her tea, or was offered the bits and pieces left over from preparing meals with her mother.
It was one of her brothers who pointed it out, pinching the ample flesh of her upper arm and hissing into her ear how unfair it was, what had she done to deserve it, fat cow? It was mortifying to realise, looking into the eyes of the others scrunched up in the bed they all shared, that they all felt the same way. Next day she’d asked her parents to work in the fields with the others and had refused a special treat of sugar. A week later she was here at the farm. She was eleven years old.
Five years later and here she was still, wheezing and shuffling along the landing towards the bathroom and the bucket, tripped out on poppy juice for the pain. Somewhere downstairs she could hear music playing. Her tormentors were down there, having a laugh and listening to music playing on machinery paid for by her rendered fat, while she was suffering to keep it playing a little longer, and to fuel the cars driven by a select few. How could this be fair? How could she ever have thought it was fair?
The buckets were heavy and banged against her shins as Dorcas backed cautiously through the door to the cellar, pivoting on the spot to be sure of not taking a tumble down the steep stone steps that led from the kitchen. She gave soft grunts of effort at each tread, taking care not to spill any of the buckets’ contents. The fat was solid at room temperature, but could still leave a slimy mess, treacherous underfoot.
The smell from the rendering room had permeated the stairwell and she wrinkled her nose in disgust, taking shallow breaths. At the bottom of the stairs was a screen made up of old strips of plastic, to keep flies and other insects out, and here she turned and backed through. It was stiflingly hot on the other side; Agnes had already lit the stove and was warming the pan they would use to melt down the fat Dorcas was delivering. Tiny vents high in the wall were inadequate to remove all the smoke escaping the chimney and the room was slightly hazed.
‘Right girl, you get this lot started, I’ve another bucket to bring down.’
Carrying buckets was more menial work than Dorcas liked her girls to see her do. It was important to her that she maintain her status as someone above that sort of thing, but Ivy was off with the flu and Spight was complaining he didn’t have enough fuel to get the next supply run in to the village, so needs must. And she hated the rendering room and its smells and smoke. Better to do the donkey work than stir the blubber as it rendered down to oil.
Dorcas poured the blood-threaded lumps of yellow, waxy fat out of the buckets and into the pan, scraping out the residue with a metal spoon, then handed the spoon to Agnes, who started poking around and distributing it more evenly.
‘Mind you don’t let it burn,’ Dorcas admonished her, before starting the journey back up the stairs, empty buckets banging carelessly together. ‘I’ve got to go take care of our prize cow. She’ll be shipped out soon enough and she’s got to be fit to travel.’
The compression bandages were helping a bit. So was the poppy juice Dorcas had been trotting in with every four hours. It was helping so much that Primrose had spat the last dose into a water glass and hidden it on the windowsill, behind the curtain above her bed, keeping it for later. Because Primrose had a plan. She had to get out of here, and she had to do it tonight while everyone thought she was in too much pain to move. Hopefully, she could stash enough poppy juice to see her through the escape. She could still remember how difficult it had been walking the last time; at least this time, she might be in pain from the dozens of healing punctures in her flesh, but she wouldn’t be carrying so much weight.
Clothes. She needed clothes. And shoes. Her own had been taken when she arrived, and even if she still had them they would no longer fit her. She had grown upwards as well as sideways over the last five years. She knew Dorcas kept a wardrobe of assorted garments and footwear on this corridor, for the rare occasions she took her livestock out of the farm to village events such as Christmas concerts or fêtes. That hadn’t happened for at least a couple of years, since the drive for more and more fuel had become the new norm. But presumably the clothes were still there.
The first time she tried to have a look, pretending she needed to go to the toilet again, Agnes whisked out of a room at the end of the corridor and Primrose had to turn away quickly and pretend she was just on her way into the bathroom. She waited a good ten minutes before going back out, but Agnes was still there, dusting the staircase, and Primrose returned to her room frustrated. She waited another hour, then groaned, clutched her stomach and moaned that she had to go back to the loo. Alise looked at her with indifference and continued crunching her way through a bag of imported crisps, her reward for passing her weight gain target the day before. The rest of her booty – chocolate and a tin of biscuits – lay scattered over her blanket.
This time the corridor was empty. The wardrobe was past the bathroom, set back in an alcove. After checking there was still no one about, Primrose opened one of its two doors and was rewarded by the sight of coats and shoes. She grabbed a coat at random and a pair of shoes that looked like they should fit. The other door revealed shelves of folded clothes and a rail of dresses. Wanting loose garments that wouldn’t aggravate her wounds, she grabbed a dress and what looked like a jumper. Too scared to take the time to look to see what else was there, or to check for fit, she closed both doors.
Now what? She couldn’t take them back to the room while Alise was there and awake. The bathroom had a cupboard for storing the threadbare towels and sheets for this landing, and she headed there as fast as she could limp, burrowing in to the back, stashing the clothes where they would stay hidden until the next bed change, which shouldn’t be for another few days unless everyone became incontinent at once. Heart beating wildly with elation, she closed the door and turned to find Agnes, come to retrieve the bucket.
‘What are you doing in there?’ Agnes was only a couple of years older than her, but she was looking at Primrose as if she had true seniority, rather than a job skivvying for Dorcas and carrying shit around. Primrose felt a blush rise up her neck and, in that moment, she hated the other girl.
‘I was looking for sanitary towels, I think I’m about to come on,’ Primrose improvised, amazed at her own ready response. She clutched at her belly to back up her story and winced as the pressure bore down on the punctures from the liposuction.
‘We don’t keep them in there, Dorcas has a store cupboard upstairs. And you don’t go getting your own, you know we bring them to you.’
‘I know, I’m sorry, I just didn’t want to make a mess for you to have to clear up.’ Primrose smiled ingratiatingly and started towards the door behind Agnes, stooped over and holding her belly.
‘Surprised you can feel anything with all that medicine,’ Agnes huffed, but she made way for Primrose and picked up the bucket. ‘I’ll bring you some pads in a minute, and a hot water bottle. Just got to deal with this.’ Her nose wrinkled, and Primrose felt ashamed of the pulse of hatred she had felt a moment ago. Agnes was just as trapped as she was.
A cold wind was blowing in off the waters of Plymouth Sound. Clouds were clearing to reveal a new moon coming up in the eastern sky. Will’s mum, a keen believer in astrology, would have seen it as auspicious at the beginning of their mission, and approved. Thinking of her, and his dad and his sisters, Will felt a moment of longing that made his heart clench. It had been months since he had seen or spoken to his family. Alone in the darkness, hoping his part in the events of the night would not be necessary, he felt afraid, scared he’d mess things up and let everyone down, even more scared of what would happen to him if he got caught. He tried to control his breathing, as he had been taught, to calm himself and focus on the present moment. It helped a bit.
Which was when he became aware he was hungry. All he had was a bag of last year’s walnuts and a flask of water to see him through. In the end, there had been so many questions the night before there hadn’t even been time for more than a couple of the home-made biscuits Mrs Mason had brought with her. Which she was now, presumably, eating with the Major while they waited for the boat. The hours between had been a rush of small missions, carrying information and equipment to other teams, with little time for more than a sandwich.
In the truck, before he and the others headed for their boats, the Major had roused his team by reminding them that Spight’s grip was strong, but heavily dependent on three things. Inertia, and his control of goods coming in from outside Devon’s borders accounted for two of them. The destruction of the road and rail bridges at Saltash, the mining of the A30 and A39, checkpoints at all minor roads crossing the borders and control of its ports and harbours, meant that very little came in that he didn’t then disburse through an efficient system of bribes and cronyism. And – which was even more damaging according to the briefing seminars Will had fidgeted through – he controlled the types of goods imported, setting up trade deals with regressive fiefdoms such as the Real USA’s New Jersey, Ohio and Florida, as well as Poland, China and Saudi Arabia; choosing fossil fuels, junk food and substandard electronics built without guarantees or safeguards and thus needing frequent replacing. Crap that fulfilled an immediate want but no actual need.
With global demand for gimmicky rubbish at an historic low – as more socially developed states put the cooling of the planet above individual whims – these retrograde states were totally dependent on each other for trade.
The third thing Spight exploited was energy. With no access to cheap fuel, he had a monopoly on all energy supplies within the county. In the first few years after Devolution, thousands of trees and hedgerows had been cut down by people desperate to heat their homes during savage winters and cook their food year-round. Once he became Mayor, Spight had taken control of public woodlands and set up licensed groups to manage them (taking a share of the licence money), to ensure trees were planted as well as harvested: fast-growing varieties such as willow, hazel and sycamore. He befriended or threatened those with private woods, persuading them to allow similar groups on their land, in exchange for some of his imported goods. Everyone was entitled to a share, but allocations were controlled by patronage and favour, and anyone found with more than their allocation was at risk from a judicial system administering penalties that began with public shunning and escalated rapidly to summary execution.
Their Stage One mission tonight was to attack the first two things propping up Spight’s regime. By intercepting the scheduled delivery, due in from New Jersey, they would hit Spight where he kept his feelings – in his pocket – and show him up as fallible. Once this had been achieved, Stage Two – drawing him out – would follow on naturally. From there, the Major promised them, it was but a short step to Stage Three.
Will’s part in all this was simple. As one of the youngest and least experienced of the team, he was to stay out of harm’s way, and report back to Mal via walkie-talkie from his observation post, in shadows at the water’s edge of the deep-water dock in Plymouth. If anyone came to disrupt the blockade he was to alert first Mal and then the Major, but to stay out of any violence that might ensue. He was secretly relieved by this. He was nervous enough without the fear of being obliged to get into a physical fight. Two years of fight training and six months of active deployment had not obliged him to hurt anyone, and the thought of doing so filled him with nausea.
The usual docking procedure was for incoming vessels to anchor inside the breakwater and wait for daylight, before unloading onto smaller boats that would come inshore to dock. It was unlikely any workers would arrive the night before a scheduled delivery run, but they couldn’t be certain, and so the Major had detailed Will as lookout.
He was hidden from casual observers by a small wooden shack that had survived the developers, back in the day when Plymouth was undergoing its first makeover since the 1960s. At the turn of the millennium, Mrs P had told them in a history lesson – shortly before she was banned from teaching them modern history – there had been an attempt to boost the national economy by building new houses and roads, paid for by the taxpayer and making the owners of construction companies very rich, something she called corporate welfare.
When the global economy crashed in the early 2020s – as the reality of climate change bit and efforts were finally made to cut carbon emissions, as fossil-fuel giants fought back, countries disintegrated, and Devon devolved – everyone who had bought second homes in the city upped and left, along with thousands of university students who had been the source of much of the city’s employment. There were few jobs for those that remained; more people left. Plymouth was a ghost of its former self, with rows of vacant houses and empty high-rise blocks of flats, and a bleak city centre of boarded up and burned out shops.
The docks, halfway through the process of becoming luxury waterside flats when the crash happened, still serviced some smaller cargo ships. The larger vessels were kept out by a harbour slowly filling up with silt. National government used to keep the harbour dredged to accommodate naval aircraft carriers and Trident submarines, but now the Kingdom was no longer United, there was no regional money to pick up the slack and Plymouth’s imports by sea were under threat. Will wondered if Spight had a plan for when the cargo boats could no longer dock.
But that wasn’t an issue tonight. The cargo ship coming at Spight’s behest would be meeting their flotilla, out beyond the breakwater. The Major, Mrs Mason, Tom, Dick and Harriet, and a host of resistance activists from across Devon and Cornwall, were waiting in small boats, using up precious fuel, preparing to turn back the cargo vessel by whatever means necessary. Of course, it could all go horribly wrong. It was a cold night to be rammed and thrown into the sea. In the dark. Chopped up by propellers. Shot at. Drowned. Will shivered and his stomach churned. At least he was no longer hungry.
Two miles out to sea, the Major was unknowingly echoing Will’s concerns for the safety of himself and the others, who remained invisible even when the slim crescent of the moon emerged from behind cloud to cast light upon the swell. There was a strict embargo on showing lights until their target was in sight. Bobbing around in a small fibreglass day sailing boat with Mrs Mason, as the moon disappeared, and absolute blackness settled all around him, they could have been on their own in the middle of the ocean, if it weren’t for the sound of waves breaking on the boulders of the breakwater, and the occasional light on the horizon behind them.
If only .... The Major drew his thoughts back from that particular cliff edge and turned them in the direction of their mission. Which should be starting … he began to check his watch and realised he couldn’t see it in the dark. And couldn’t show a light. Which meant he couldn’t smoke his pipe. He held it loosely in one hand anyway.
Never mind, he thought, it couldn’t be long now.
It felt like an age before lights appeared off their starboard bow, still way off in the distance as a ship rounded Rame Head. From its running lights, it was headed straight for them. Time to gear up.
He could hear a gentle snoring. Mrs M had fallen asleep. He nudged her and she snorted awake. ‘Boat’s on its way in,’ he whispered.
‘Why are we whispering, who’s going to hear us?’ Mrs M whispered back.
‘There could be a lookout at the breakwater, sound carries.’
He could sense an eyebrow being raised, but she kept her opinion to herself.
‘Papa Bear to Baby Bears, Papa Bear to Baby Bears, hold position and get ready for the approaching bowl, over,’ the Major rasped into his walkie-talkie. Mrs M had chosen the call signs, designating herself Goldilocks. Her reasoning, that no one accidentally coming across their wavelength would take them seriously.
‘Baby One to Papa Bear, received and understood, standing by, over,’ came through the walkie-talkie. Tom and his team were in position.
‘Baby Two to Papa Bear, received and understood, standing by, over.’ So were Dick and his team.
‘Baby Three to Papa Bear, received and understood, standing by, over.’ This came through so close he heard Harriet’s voice in stereo, both through the radio and from his left, nearby.
‘Papa Bear to Baby Three, we’re too bunched up, get yourself over to port. No engines, you’ll need to row. Over.’
He could hear Harriet and her team cursing as they hunted in the bottom of their boat for their oars. A clatter of wood as the oars were slotted into rowlocks and then silence. He gave them a couple of minutes, then ‘Papa Bear to Baby Three, give your position, over.’
‘No idea Papa Bear, but we can’t hear you any more. Er … Baby Three. Over.’
‘Roger that.’ It would have to do.
The lights of the oncoming boat were coming closer. The Major reckoned they had another five minutes until it would be upon them. Mrs Mason nudged his shoulder and passed him her hipflask and a piece of flapjack. While he sipped whisky and ate, he heard her going over their weapons, dry-firing to check the mechanisms were in good working order, before loading them with the few bullets they had. Guns were still fairly easy to come by. Ammunition was harder to find.