From up where I was, half a mile away, on a hill, it looked like a series of old and open boxes. There were huge hangars in the centre, and grids of unfinished toy houses round the edge. Years ago, someone had taken the sign from Debenhams and rearranged it so it said DAM HENS – but all the letters were gone now. After what Davey said, I would have thought I’d be able to see fighting from a distance. But there was no noise and I couldn’t see a single person there.
I put another berry into my mouth and I remember thinking, did we just invent this? Did we stay inside our houses and think we weren’t allowed to leave but actually it was all just in our heads?
But that was when the music started. The squeak of a speaker system. The highest sound. Then something like cellos, but also a thumping beat. All of it coming from Westwood. And that was when I accidentally squashed all the berries that were left in my hand, and ran in the opposite direction.
When I got back to the caravans, I went to get a bottle of whisky I’d found that morning. I’d found it together with a pack of cigarettes tucked up on a ridge underneath one of the trailers. One cigarette was missing but, apart from that, neither had been touched. They were in a plastic bag bought from a petrol station. I imagined the dad who’d probably brought it back here, planned to enjoy away from his wife and kids. The receipt was still in the bag. It had the brand names written out on it, prices. The magic of that.
I sat on a deckchair under a parasol with broken spokes. The seal on the bottle broke with a crack. I told myself I’d have a quick sip, then pack up, get going again.
The problem was, I kept on thinking about the music from Westwood. I thought about it more and more. The whisky made my veins less stiff; it felt like hope, or something close to it, and in a cloud of madness, it seemed to make sense that I should go back there.
I woke up in the same deckchair with the bottle in my lap, only a few inches of it left. The cigarettes were nearly finished too, and I’d folded the pack into some sort of origami. I didn’t remember doing that. I just about had time to think what an idiot I was, when I leaned out of the chair and vomited again – brown milk now. I wondered if I was actually ill. Like Mac had been, or Caleb.
Home. My stomach clenched again. Like a fist, tighter than that. I cleaned my chin. I packed up my stuff. But still, the music was the only thing I could think of. I thought about how they used to play music at the train station and at bus stops because it made people calmer. Music was a good thing. Maybe it was still playing.
I climbed back up the shallow hill. The music had stopped, but I could see people in one of the car parks now. I made a frame around my eyes with my fingers so I could focus more. Green had cracked through the tarmac but you could still see some of the car park markings, faded white rectangles. The people were sitting on the roofs of cars with their feet where the engine would be. I heard the sound of a laugh. Their bodies looked big, that was one of the first things I noticed. Like they had enough to eat. Then I heard another laugh.
This sudden feeling of hope again. What if it was nice there? What if there was someone in charge? What if they were cooking meals? Not food but meals. I couldn’t get my body to move away. I was imagining eating. I wondered if they were planning how to get across, if maybe it would be easier if we were all together.
I think I was about to stand up and start walking towards them when suddenly I heard a noise in the bushes behind me. I jerked round but couldn’t see anyone. Then a twig or a stone landed in the grass next to me. I reached for the gun, but the T-shirt was too tight around it. I flinched, expecting to feel something heavy and hard against the back of my head. But the only thing that came was a voice.
‘Don’t do it,’ the voice said, and before I could unwrap the gun, I turned and saw the person the voice came from. It was a woman. A woman with a dirty face and white hair in a ponytail on top of her head. ‘I know what you’re thinking of doing, but you shouldn’t.’ I stared at her. ‘Don’t mind that,’ she said, pointing to the mud on her face, ‘I put that there.’
The mud sat dark in her wrinkles. She told me her name – quickly, like doing that would be the thing that would stop us hurting each other.
‘You’re too young for me to let you go there and get killed,’ she said. ‘Don’t do it. Those men are no good. I promise you that.’
She noticed me looking at her arms and told me not to worry, she just bruised easily. It’s funny. She didn’t look like my mum at all, not really, but when I looked at her all I could think was – my mum won’t get a chance to do that, to get old like that.
‘I have a place,’ I found myself saying. ‘A place where I’m staying. If you like we could sit there. We could talk for a bit.’
When we got to the caravan park, she said she’d been there before, but she didn’t know when, because she kept accidentally going in circles. She had a bag. It was lots of plastic carrier bags, one inside the other, but over time, holes had rubbed through the outer bags so you could see flashes of different plastics. She pulled out something that looked like an abacus. There was silvery flesh on the grid of it. She pulled a piece off and started to chew.
She told me it was water-bird meat, dried in the sun, and told me how they tasted fatty, but almost like fish. She offered me some and I tried it in the end. I let it sit in my mouth, and it melted – this soft, acidy melting – so slowly it was almost comforting.
She told me she was looking for her daughter, and asked if I’d seen her. She said that apart from the birds, there were water plants I could eat too. Sea cabbage, something like that. She said I’d have to remember the way she described these things because she didn’t have the energy to walk with me to find them.
I let her take a look at Davey’s map, and she spread out the soft material over her knee in a way that made me think of a pirate. ‘Monstan?’ she said.
‘Manston.’
‘Not a writer, your friend.’ She looked at me. She looked at the map again. ‘Where do you reckon we are on this?’
I pointed. She shook her head, and drew a new map on top of Davey’s with her shaky fingers. She saw it all differently.
‘What about the wall?’ I said. ‘Have you been there yet?’
‘Wall?’ she said. ‘I don’t know any wall.’ She got a little bit of the dried bird meat out of her teeth with her middle fingernail. ‘I must have left before all that.’
I asked her what was wrong with Westwood, and she told me that it was only men, and that nothing is good when it’s only men, because it’s the easiest way to get rid of evolution. She kept on falling asleep. Eventually, she told me she was tired and asked if she could stay the night.
‘It’s not like it’s mine,’ I said.
‘Still, good to be polite.’
She stood a little closer to me and asked if she was allowed to hug me and I said okay and she didn’t smell that good or that bad either and we both shut our eyes and pretended the other was another person, I think.
‘I’m looking for someone too,’ I said. ‘My brother and my son.’ My throat closed. ‘It’s the same person. And a girl. Another girl.’
I had to tell someone. I wanted to tell someone. Her heartbeat was slow, steady, I felt it.
‘We’ll find them,’ she said.