‘
It’s a pub sign,’ I said.
‘
No, I know what the sign is, not the sign stupid,’ he was pointing, ‘what’s your picture supposed to be?’ he quizzed.
‘
Its an oak tree with a crown on it,’ I said.
‘
Why?’
As we unpacked, I told them about Charles II who, in sixteen-hundred-and-something, had climbed up an oak tree to escape. I promised myself I would look it up in the Dickens’
Child’s History of England
.
‘
Zombies?’ asked his sister Janam, wide-eyed.
‘
Roundheads,’ Dal said. ‘That was when you folk had other things to worry about, I think,’ he boomed from within his beard, and started to tell the children about the English Civil War. Jerry let me paint sitting on the veranda of his pub in the quiet sunlight, the heavy wooden shutter propped up to let the fumes out. There were enough fumes coming from his eye-watering stills in the chalk-walled room below, and when Jerry gave me a nip of his Sussex Moonshine for lunch I thought my head had caught fire. I sanded back the sign writing, and guessed that the shape of the oak tree would easily be adapted to become the top of Cissbury Ring. Jerry had left the design up to me, and I decided to do a slightly different image on each side.
On the first, the profile of the Ring stood out against a thunderous sky, the trenches below filled with dancing skeletons. On the summit I painted Lou, Jay, Al and I, weapons drawn. The second side was exactly the same view, but in summer sunshine, with meadow flowers in the ditch, and a curl of wood smoke rising from the camp on top. Jerry loved it, and we put it up the night before he was due to open. He’d covered it with a cloth which he intended to remove dramatically at the opening ceremony, but it blew off about midday so he just opened up early and we abandoned the ceremony. The place was heaving within minutes, and Jerry simply kept a tab of who had drunk what, presumably to wave at people when he needed their assistance.
He had already spoken to David as quartermaster and me as one of the Group of Four, to arrange some sort of exchange system so customers who didn’t make stuff but could offer their own manpower had something to barter for drinks with. If, for example, you could only offer extra shifts on things like the security detail or mucking out the poo-trench which everyone was expected to do, then you could swap one of Jerry’s shifts for a strong drink. But if Jerry likes the sheepskin purses your friend makes, you could do two of your friends’ “shit-shifts”, as they had become known, and get two strong drinks from Jerry. Or if you’d helped design and build the pub with Jerry you could get free drinks for the foreseeable future and prop up the end of the bar, regaling those in earshot (everyone) with tales of derring-do.
The pub was already a hub of activity, as people swapped shifts and possessions in order to get a round in. Before long hearty bales of laughter rang out, which were soon joined by the crackly sounds of an old jazz record on the gramophone Jerry had brought up from his house.
The presence of a public house up there on Cissbury Ring suggested that all the other houses were private, and that was certainly the case. Before long, the exchange of services had become accepted and practised enough by the majority for it to be perfectly feasible for someone to get a house built and then starve to death in it if they didn’t carry on pulling their weight. Many people opted out of the communal food and foraged for themselves. Sometimes they would go hungry; sometimes they would have a glut of provisions with which to barter. It was all about striking a personal balance, and as I had to say to several of the newcomers who had pissed and moaned about the smell, the mud or a hundred other things; ‘Muck in, build your own house, then I don’t care what you do with your time.’
Christmas was the best Christmas I’d ever had. Jerry organised a Wassail for everyone, toasting bread and dipping it in mead made from the honey of a hive he and Jay had plundered, and hanging it in the branches of what we had worked out was probably the oldest tree on Cissbury Ring. We banged pots and pans to chase away bad spirits, apparently. The fun was facilitated by more of Jerry’s brew, but the children just got high on sweets that Dawn had been saving for them. My big plan, the stoned one I had come up with when I’d swapped the horse, paid off. I took two bulging potato sacks around the camp and proudly handed back everything that people had swapped with the ‘travelling tinker’, as my mum insisted on calling him.
Rings, chains, watches, glasses, prescribed medicine, books, lighters, binoculars – all were returned to their previous owners to gawping mouths and much disbelief. Jenna looked sick, but Lou had let me have her old mascara for Jenna, and she had cried when I gave it to her. I had also painted house signs for each of my friends, and my dad had blubbed like a girl when I gave him the little Spitfire model. I was tempted to tell mum she’d not behaved enough to get a present, but I didn’t have the heart and presented her with some flowers Lou had pressed at the end of summer, folded into a little square of oven paper. Dal and Glyn had bartered some of the flint arrowheads from the pits for a travel Scrabble with the visitor, and they both gave it to me ‘from the children’. Al had saved me, Jay and Lou a spliff each, but he had been impatient and had smoked all his own already, so we agreed we’d share ours with him - it was a close call but it seemed only fair. Jay had got Al a miniature bottle of Malibu from his dad, and Al had made Jay a wooden scabbard for his sword. Secret Santa had visited again.
I definitely got the best present – Lou woke me up on Christmas morning with a kiss, sat down in front of me and pulled two wedding rings out from inside one of her snotty tissues. I hadn’t been able to leave the cabin for an hour after she told me how she’d come by them.
It was an odd tale indeed - the hounds had been quite content to scratch out a general bed and lounging area under the gnarled low boughs of one of the older trees on the Ring, behind our house so the general wind direction would carry early warnings and the smell of camp cooking to their eager muzzles. It provided welcome shelter from the sun on the exposed hilltop, but in winter it formed a natural igloo as the ice bound the knotted branches together and the hard-driven snow filled the cracks. Their combined body heat did the rest, but on the coldest nights I’d put a soft-glowing log under there on the chalkiest scrap of earth as a treat.
David regularly had to check the odd little nest for things that had gone missing from the quartermaster’s stores which now doubled as a sort of general store crossed with a lending library of tools and talents. Like all dogs I knew they collected - and fought over - favourite sticks or scraps of cloth, or a lamb bone with the faintest smell of cooking still on it. The den was their canine quartermaster’s store. Treasures or memories; only they know what significance such crap possesses. Floyd had taken a fancy to these little carved bone handles for walking sticks and knives that some old chap was making, and several had gone missing from the stores where he was offering them for swap. After some enquiries, David checked in the hounds’ shrub-kennel and found the two wedding rings. He took them to Lou to see if they would stand as a substitute for the ones we had lost. It was only after washing them and checking the hallmarks that Lou realised that they were our actual wedding rings.
Making Amends
[days 0205 – 0345]
At its peak the ice had formed thickly on the stony tracks across the Downs, making foraging slippery and dangerous - even the horses had trouble getting up and down the slopes of the Ring. Lou had started to remember some of her dreams when she woke and, whilst she found it hard to talk about them, she had recounted some of her fiercest nightmares to me. Just after Christmas she kept having one recurring dream about her work colleague Susie. She described walking in the moonlight along the Downs, brushing closed flower buds with her fingers, drinking in the cool, still air. The path crunched, crystalline under her feet, and she said barn owls would silently swoop past her like ghosts. Then she’d stop, and turn, seeing what she had been distracted from seeing before. Impaled on a sharpened fence post was Susie, leaning back with her bra in the air, talking to Lou about work, her boyfriend she was thinking of dumping, and about getting her nails done. Then she would stop, in silent, gaping mouthed spasm, and her flesh would peel away to the bone. Teeth and hair fell out, jelly dropped to the floor, and bones sighed into dust. Lou would wake when she looked down to see the crushed skulls littering the path.
‘
How many times have you had this dream?’ I asked her one frosty morning.
‘
Loads,’ she yawned, tired from her fitful sleep. ‘It’s starting to take over from the others I think. I definitely had it last night too. It’s because I know she’s still there.’
I stroked her head. ‘Susie’s dead sweetpea. Anyway, she might not even be there anymore.’
‘
What if she’s cold?’ Lou asked.
I had got into the habit of baking bread, slowly in a second drum fitted to the top of my oak smoker fire can. I cut Lou a piece of hot, fresh bread, still doughy and moist, and spooned some rosehip jam onto it. I took it back to my wife with a cup of tea before setting off to work painting Al’s cabin walls. Lou had taken to sleeping at night again when it got really bitterly cold, but she would still have terrible nightmares, jerking our bed with their powerful grip. I hated to see Lou in this state, and was constantly thinking about how – or even if – I could help her. It turns out I had already voiced the answer, months before: to go and get Susie, and bury her. Give her a good send-off.
‘
Maybe we could go and fetch her back,’ I said to Lou that evening. She hugged me, but slept no sounder.
Winter had melted into spring, and the air was fresh. The snow had thawed, and the ice had finally disappeared. We could see hares still brilliant white in their winter coats as they got hungry and a bit too confident against the green hills. They spurred us into action, and it was after Al and I returned with the dogs from our first proper hunting expedition of the New Year that I decided to have a chat with Dawn. I told her wanted to take two horses over to the track north of Southwick with Lou to bring Susie’s corpse back. She wouldn’t let us go by ourselves but did say she’d take Lou on the back of her horse, and help me not kill myself when riding a mule of my own.
I showed Lou the map, and told her of my plan to take a horse track east, then up to meet the South Downs Way and over the footbridge at Bramber, whereupon we’d join up with Monarch’s Way down to the Southwick tunnel to get Susie. She agreed with some trepidation, but the next day the three of us set off with Lou on Dawn’s horse and me bouncing along behind them. I had brought Jay’s sword, the long-handled axe, wire cutters and some thick bleach, as well as the canvas sail Al had been using on the floor of his tepee.
We stared down at the devastation in the towns, at the impassable roads, strewn with the molten hulks of thousands upon thousands of cars. We saw the glass shattered by fire and ice, and the steel twisted to the ground. We came upon the ivory skeletons of stricken people, ripped of almost all skin and flesh by scavengers or the weather or both. Woven into the earth by the first eager shoots of spring they lay, often with their jaws gurning, their limbs still imperceptibly resisting nature’s grasp, as they returned to the earth in super slow-motion. We saw three stinkers which must have survived the winter as humans before turning recently, their thick coats and shredded winter gloves betraying their season of infection. They were easy, and went down hard as we struck at their heads and necks from horseback.
Bodies were piled high on the river bank, squirming in the mud or in the reeds, their bellies swollen and their faces blistered. We stopped to speak to a man who was fishing off the footbridge. He said his friend had got infected from eating the fish, as the bodies were piled up in the river for too long, but he was just fishing for fun. He seemed relaxed enough, and patted his dog, a border collie, who he told us was an excellent look-out. He was from the camp up at Bramber Castle, and said we should drop by when we passed back through. He said they’d seen our fires at Cissbury Ring, and were intending to send a party out to greet us, so we should definitely pop our heads in on our way back.
‘
What are you doing out here?’ he asked.
‘
Collecting one of our colleagues. We left them over that way on the day it broke out,’ I said.
‘
I don’t fancy there’ll be too much left of them by now,’ he said, rubbing his cheeks. ‘Still, good luck, eh?’
We said our goodbyes and made our way east. Dawn could gather a substantial pace when she wanted the horses to, and soon we were approaching Shoreham and the Southwick Tunnel. When the copse with Susie’s corpse in stood in view at the bottom of the hill, Lou asked Dawn to stop. She wanted to walk the rest of the way, to do in the sunshine what her dreams only let her do at night. Dawn and I watched as she approached the edge of the woods and the fence we had impaled her workmate on. Dawn led the horses slowly behind Lou, so we were never more than twenty feet away, and we watched as Lou stopped and held her hands to her face.
For a moment I thought someone had come and swapped Susie for someone else – she was unrecognisable. After a while though, I saw that the clothes were the same as she’d worn that hot day last year – the pencil skirt, and her bra now grey and tattered, still strung into the air by the splintered fence post. I could see the dry flaps of her breasts, leathery and mildewed. She looked pretty motionless, but as our smells and sounds got more intense she was spurred into action again. She had already ‘expelled’ - the ground around her was slicked with black, slippery fat. Birds had pecked away most of the skin from her face and shoulders; I suspected rodents had feasted on pretty much everything else.