Victor is back from Limerick. At the site, they unload sacks from his van. The sacks are heavy. Lined up by the hole, they look like body bags about to be tossed in a mass grave. What is this stuff? PJ says, peering into one. It is full of blue powder. Bentonite clay, Victor says.
When they finished digging the hole, Victor had produced a long, plastic pipe from his van. He cut slits into the bottom third of it using a circular saw; these ‘gills’, as he called them, would allow water to flow in, but not dirt or rocks. Then he fed the pipe down into the hole, and filled up the space around it with gravel, three feet deep, to the water line. Now they will fill the rest of the hole with the blue clay. In the moisture of the soil, it will solidify and seal the well, so no contaminants from the ground can leach down into the water.
At first it looks to Dickie like there are far more bags than they’ll need. But then they start pouring in the clay and it seems just to disappear. He thinks again how being up above it all the time, you never really get a feel for how much ground there is in the ground, how much earth there is to the earth, what it takes for us to have something to walk on.
In the end they don’t have enough. Cursing, Victor goes off to find a signal so he can call his man in Limerick. Dickie and PJ sit on the log. What happens once the rest of the clay comes? PJ asks.
Then we’re almost there, Dickie says. Victor wants to fit an electric pump and hook it up to a water tank. But a hand pump would do us for now. Then we’re done, pretty much.
And the Bunker’s almost finished too, PJ says, not looking at him.
The basics, anyway, Dickie agrees.
And then we go back to the house, PJ says. Everything goes back to normal.
Right, only now we’ll have a survival shelter. He hesitates, trying to read the boy’s mood. There’ll be more bits and pieces to do, he says. We can come down at the weekends, keep tipping away at it? He nudges him conspiratorially. Though you’ve probably had enough digging to last you a lifetime!
PJ doesn’t speak, just stares at his shoes.
It’s a relief when Victor comes back with the news that it could be a week before his man in Limerick has the clay in stock again. In the meantime, he has a new project. First, he covers the exterior walls of the Bunker with chicken wire. Next, he takes twigs and branches from the forest floor, and begins to weave them into it. What’s that for? Dickie says. Insulation?
Camouflage, Victor says.
Camouflage? Dickie laughs.
Leaves along the sides, Victor says, and the roof we can seed with grass. Then you’ll have the whole place invisible.
Wait till they hear in the town I’ve an invisible Bunker, Dickie says humorously. People will be saying I’ve gone off the deep end altogether.
Well, if they do say it, you and me know why, Victor says, turning his back to thread a leafy tree limb into the wire.
Why’s that, so?
Because they’re scared.
PJ looks at Dickie a split-second before he’s ready with a reassuring smile. Who’s scared, Dad?
Victor turns to them both, swollen muscles pushing through his mud-spattered shirt. People aren’t stupid, he says. They can see what’s coming. But they’re too scared to do anything about it. Instead all they can think is to pretend it’s not happening. Keep going, like everything’s normal. Pour on more fuel, to show there’s no fire. But the day will come when they won’t be able to deny it any longer. They’ll go to the supermarket and find the shelves are empty. They’ll turn on the TV to get the news, but there won’t be any news. No more power, no more internet, no more water when they turn on the tap. All that stuff is gone, it’s over! And what’ll they do then? Then they’ll come crying to the ones they laughed at. They’ll come with their hands out to the ones who had the sense to prepare. To you. But you won’t be home. You’ll be here, invisible, where they can’t find you. Because you’ve prepared for that too.
Around him and behind him, the wind strikes up, the treetops go swish-swish, swish-swish; evening arrives, in the sudden, surprise-attack way it’s been doing all week as autumn takes hold, seeming to bloom from the air in dark-blue clouds that soak into it moment by moment until it is drenched, the air, the day, it is saturated in deep blue, like the blue clay dust that fills the well, immersing bodies, trees, the van, the tents, then slowly sealing them up within it.
You’re talking about worst-case scenarios, Dickie says, aware of PJ’s eyes on him. Obviously they’ll step in before it gets that bad. The government, I mean. Mitigate the worst effects.
Victor laughs. Do you see anyone doing any mitigating? Do you see anyone doing a fucking thing?
Yes, yes, Dickie says, gesturing to the boy: he doesn’t need to hear all this. You don’t need to give us the whole sales pitch. We’re only doing this for the bit of fun. A place the kids and their pals can camp out, that’s all we’re looking to do.
Victor stares at him like they have come to a fork in the road. It’s not enough to build it, Dickie. You need to be ready to protect it. Survival is a zero-sum game.
What does that mean, Dad? PJ whispers. Dickie waves the question away. Shouldn’t you go and check your traps? he asks Victor pointedly.
Say in five years the you-know-what hits the fan, Victor says, ignoring him. A drought, a flood, whatever it is. Harvests fail, then the next year they fail again. Suddenly what you’re looking at in Europe is a famine. That might not be what they’re calling it on the news, but that’s what it is. It’s worse in Ireland because we’re a little island that imports half its food.
Now you’ve been wise. You’ve stocked up enough to feed your family for a year and please God that’ll get you out the other end of it. There you are sitting at home, patting yourself on the back and thinking that things could be worse, when the neighbours come knocking on your door. You want to help them. Of course you do. You’re a good man, Dickie Barnes, everyone knows it. But food to feed your family for a year is only enough to feed two families for six months. And that’s just the beginning. Then the doorbell goes again. More neighbours, more friends. Three families, four. You bring them in too, you can feed everybody for four months, for three months. But what happens the next time the bell rings? How many families live within five miles of here, would you say? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Do you see what I’m driving at?
And when you decide you can’t feed any more, what happens then? When you stop answering your door, what do you think they do, the starving people, on your doorstep? You think they’re just going to turn around and go home? You think just because they’re your friends and neighbours it’ll all stay peaceful and respectful? You think Myanmar and South Sudan weren’t all how-d’ye-do and Tidy Towns before they started hacking each other to pieces?
That’s why they say, begging your pardon, when the shit hits. It’s shit. Everything’s going to get covered in it. Everything’s going to stink. Your neighbour’s not your neighbour any more. He’s not someone you borrow a power hose from and talk to about the match. He’s someone taking the food meant for your children. He’s competition for limited resources. Everyone will be in need, everyone will be under pressure, they will do things they never believed they could do, and that’s before we talk about the others who will come, strangers—
Stop, Dickie mutters.
What others, Dad? PJ is huddled up against him now, clinging to him like he’s five years old again. Victor is a luminous ghost in the oceanic forest night, some phosphorescent lascar crawled out of the shipwrecked Bunker.
None of this is set in stone, Dickie blurts. His voice is high and querulous. He does not sound much, to his own ears, like the rational one, the measured one, the one who has retained a sense of proportion. It’s all in the future, none of it might ever happen.
It might not, Victor agrees. I hope to God it doesn’t. But if it does, you’d better be ready.
With that, taking his hammer, he turns and is gone. PJ, at Dickie’s side, lets out a curious sound, a gasp, sort of a hoosh. Dickie closes his eyes, opens them again. It doesn’t seem to make much difference.
He’s angry with Victor for dragging up all this stuff in front of the boy. After her class project on climate change, Cass couldn’t sleep for a month. She stayed up making lists of all the local animals that had gone extinct. He’d catch her looking at him with rings under her eyes. Are we the bad guys?
PJ is different: he knows more about it than Cass – than Dickie too, most likely; maybe he’s better able to separate the facts from the hyperbole. He does a good impression of the YouTube preppers when Victor’s not around (Meet your new best friend – your tarp.) He seems to treat their predictions as ghost stories, the kind you might tell around a campfire; which in a way they are, ghost stories from the future.
After Victor’s tirade he goes back to gathering branches and adding them to the Bunker’s new mantle. It’s only after nightfall he asks, as if in passing, Is Victor right, Dad? Are we going to die?
Everyone dies in the end.
No, I mean the way he says. From starving. Or burning.
No. No. They’ll fix it. People will cotton on in the end. They always do.
Do you know every year there’s more flights? Like more people taking planes? Still?
Is that right?
We did it in school. And more coal burned.
Dickie takes a deep breath. I suppose in the end you can’t let yourself think about it too much. I mean, you can only be responsible for what you do yourself.
Is that why we’re building the Bunker?
We’re building it so we have somewhere we can all be together.
Where the people can’t find us?
Shh. Go to sleep.
As a teen, Dickie had been obsessed with the end of the world. Nuclear attack, inferno, killer bees; for a long time, he took it for granted that he would end his days in an internment camp, cholera-ridden, watching the smoking ruins of the razed world through a scrim of barbed wire.
His father told Dickie he’d better snap out of it. A pessimist will never be a great salesman, he said. The salesman believes in the future. The future is good, that’s your number one message! Who’s going to shell out twenty grand on a new car if he thinks the sky’s about to fall on his head?
At the time, Dickie thought this was pretty vacuous. He knew about history, he knew what it looked like. But his father was right; as Dickie grew older, his outlook lightened. Or at least, he was too busy to think of global devastation.
Periodically, though, these thoughts of annihilation would return. As a student, after his accident, he would wake up screaming, imagining boots were kicking down the door. That went on for months. It came back even worse when Imelda was pregnant with Cass. Now he had something to lose. He couldn’t just climb out the window and run. He couldn’t take an overdose or put a plastic bag over his head, couldn’t simply let himself be annihilated. He would have to fight, he would have to try to protect them, even though he knew it was impossible to win. You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough –
But he must have slept, because he woke to find Imelda looking at him. Her eyes rolled white in the darkness, her hand was clamped over her mouth. What had he said?
She wouldn’t tell him, or couldn’t; she would not let him comfort her, would not lay her head down even until he went to sleep in the nursery, as she called it, though at that point it was just another empty room.
Fantasies like this, fantasies of disaster, of annihilation, being overwhelmed, dissolving, were not uncommon – that’s what he was told. Strange as it may sound, they can actually be an attempt to find relief.
Relief! He’d laughed out loud, there in the doctor’s surgery.
As I say, it’s counterintuitive. But if you think about it. In the face of a natural disaster, for instance, your own situation becomes insignificant. Your responsibility to act, your being as a person even, all of that is lifted from you. That’s an attractive idea for some people. Hence these fantasies.
But I’m not talking about fantasies. This is history – not just history, the news, today’s news.
Maybe so. But these are events far away in time or in space, unlikely to affect us here.
Unlikely to affect us yet.
The doctor shrugged accommodatingly. The computer screen showed Dickie’s vital signs. A cement mixer juddered in the distance; they were extending the practice.
Why would somebody want that? To have their being … what you said.
The doctor shifted his weight in his chair. It could be in response to a personal trauma. Something that they hadn’t come to terms with. One might look at your own situation, obviously …
Respectfully, doctor, I didn’t come here to talk about my family.
But is it possible, with the child on the way, things might be—
That is not what I came here to talk to you about. I’d prefer to stick to the—
—might be coming to a head?
No. Instead of this personal – if you’d just stick to the specific issue—
I can’t find any physical cause for the symptoms you describe, Dickie. I can’t find anything there. That’s why I’m suggesting it might be helpful to look behind the scenes a little bit. The past remains with us, in all kinds of unexpected ways. If we haven’t made peace with it, it will come back again and again.
You’re talking about ghosts?
I meant in our bodies. As pain, physical pain, mental pain. Why do you say ghosts?
I just meant … sorry, I misheard.
Do you think of it often? What happened?
Dickie? Why do you say ghosts?