At the Edge of the Game Read online

  I went outside and sat angry and confused on a rock at the water’s edge and flung stones across the expanse between the shore and the edge of the berg. I became consumed by the desire to propel a stone all the way across and hit the mass of ice. But it was too far, no matter how hard I tried.

  I wanted to leave this place immediately and never return. I almost did so, but as I sat in the cockpit, ready to start the ignition of the Unquiet Spirit, I thought of Brinnilla’s grave far away on my island. I knew it had never been Dexter’s intention for her to lie there alone forever. I knew what I had to do.

  The young sergeant sounds tired and uninterested. He must already have gone through this soul-destroying process in other towns along the Suir corridor. The rostrum is creaking, and since everyone is standing it’s hard to get a good look at the soldiers and the small deputation of town councillors who are with them.

  ‘You can’t leave town,’ the sergeant says. ‘Sorry.’

  This does not go down well. People are crammed into this stale and peeling Town Hall, sopping wet, smelling of goat.

  ‘Waterford is under the control of the military authority, mandated under the Emergency Powers Act. Law and order have been maintained. Teams are working to restore services. Others will arrive in this town soon. So there’s no need for you to leave the town. You’re safe here. You have enough food, and you have power.’

  ‘What about the IRA?’ someone shouts.

  ‘Destroyed. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  A car drives past outside. The strangeness of this occurrence makes everyone’s head turn to the door.

  How sickly are those hydrocarbon fumes, and how potent to our unaccustomed lungs, seeping into blood-vessels, inflaming neuro-receptors.

  ‘Anyone who tries to leave will find themselves arrested and locked up.’

  As good a cue as any for Heathshade to make his entrance, flanked by his fighting men. A clatter of boots as he crosses the chamber. A flick of his head and his cronies fan out, taking up positions around the side of the chamber.

  ‘Now,’says Heathshade, ‘some of you may think that there’s no need to worry any more, that everything’s going back to normal. You look at these soldiers, and think that you’re safe. Yes? You're wrong. Who saved you from the IRA? I did. Who took decisive action with the prisoners? I did. They would have been a constant security threat, maybe even find some way to contact their pals elsewhere. None of us wanted that, did we?’

  I thought I was supposed to have dreamt the executions? Helen looks like she knows what Heathshade is talking about.

  Heathshade pauses for effect, which gives Warburton a chance to get a word in. ‘I speak for the town, Mr Heathshade.’ Sort of true. ‘It's good that you're here. Since security responsibilities will be taken over by the Army, we need you and your men to hand over your weapons.’

  Heathshade laughs. ‘You're joking.’

  ‘Do it with good grace,’ says the sergeant. ‘It isn't a request.’

  ‘Have you all forgotten who saved you? You’d all be dead without me.’

  ‘We're haven't forgotten,’ says Warburton. ‘We're very grateful. Now the guns must be put away.’

  ‘Well I say the fighting is not over, and they must not be put away.’

  Arguments break out at the back between Heathshade's men and members of the audience.

  ‘Hold onto those rifles,’ Heathshade shouts out.

  No good. The guns are handed over.

  ‘You fucking idiots!’

  Warburton reaches forward and takes hold of Heathshade’s rifle. Bad move. He's sent flying, dashes his face against the wall.

  ‘You fucking asked for that. To hell with the lot of you. See how you do without me.’

  The chamber door slams. He's gone.

  ‘Forget him,’ says the sergeant. ‘Let’s get back to the business at hand.’

  Helen grabs my arm. ‘Come on.’ She pulls me to the door, out to the rainy street.

  Heathshade’s standing at the bottom of the steps, rain-blotched overcoat spread over curved shoulders. Two cars rush past, throwing up patterns of spray.

  He sees us. ‘You coming with me, then?’

  Helen speaks quickly. ‘Yes, we’re coming.’

  ‘Hey, hang on a minute – ‘

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, George, there’s no time.’

  Heathshade starts striding away. She drags me along after him.

  A long sunbeam like a searchlight in the dark cloud spans the grey slate roofs at the end of New Street and the wooded hills beyond. Another landslump has just occurred. A distant patch of forest slid and toppled, candlesticks on a bad magician’s table. More of that dark, creeping soliflux.

  The rain ratchets up a few notches. Thunder clatters around the broad, flat valley.

  We catch up with him at the door of his apartment. He gives us a dose of mirthless laughter. ‘Tell you what, George. You can earn your passage by giving me a hand. Helen, go and get your gear together. You’ve got twenty minutes.’

  Daisy Carruth opens the front door. ‘You ready?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll be quick.’

  He leads me up the Main Street. At the supermarket that now serves as supply depot, two men with machine guns are stationed. A baggage-laden car passes, beeps its horn and is away, turning left at the end of the street.

  Heathshade marches up to the men, booted feet kicking up water off the ground.

  ‘Let us through, lads.’

  They are troubled by the ambiguously directed gun barrel. He steps up to the door, tries it. It’s locked. ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘Have you got a ration slip, sir?’

  ‘Ration slip!’ He shoves past.

  The men mind their own business while we secure a trolleyful of food and enough petrol to fill a tank. He has me wheel the trolley through the West Gate, round a couple of corners to where a big bull-barred jeep is parked.

  ‘Load that stuff in the back, and fuel her up.’ He’s had it all planned. But of course. He gets in the driver’s seat, I in the passenger side, and we drive the wrong way through the one-way West Gate.

  Daisy and child are waiting at the front door.

  ‘My lady will want the front seat.’

  I cede the territory, go up to our apartment where Helen is zipping a stuffed suitcase.

  ‘It’s not anything to do with not respecting you,’ she says, taking my hand. ‘We need him. He’s the kind that survives. You…’

  Yeah, tell me, Helen. What am I?

  ‘Let’s just go with him to Waterford, and then we can go our own way, never see him again. Okay?’

  There’s no time for anything except to pick up our stuff and go. We push our cases in behind the passenger seats and strap ourselves in. He takes off down the Main Street. Around the corner in New Street we encounter a sort of mini-traffic jam. Councillors and the two soldiers stand there, looking out at us rather forlornly. People seem to be stopping to gloat before taking their leave of the town. Heathshade wants to do the same. He slows down and stops. But before any words of derision can escape from his throat, an old man in a peak cap and wet overcoat steps out from somewhere and thrusts his hand in the window.

  ‘God bless you, Marcus Heathshade, for all you did for Carrick!’

  ‘Cheers, mate.’

  Heatshade guns it. The old man falls into a puddle.

  We lurch onto the empty main road, take the turn for Waterford, shoot under a railway bridge, past abandoned commercial buildings. Then, at the edge of the town, a setback: a dip in the road ahead is flooded. A couple of cars, inundated to bonnet-height, sit dead in the silted current. Another has got through, is ascending the slope at the other side.

  The engine ticks over, and rain hammers the roof.

  ‘I think - ‘ says Helen.

  Too late. No way is Heathshade going back into town. He powers the jeep into the flood. Oozing water, dirty and cold, leaks through the door seals
onto the floor. Daisy Carruth clings to her whimpering child.

  ‘Keep her quiet.’

  I grip the handle of the door so tightly I might break my own fingers. The engine whines, strains. In a second it will die, and so will we. We pass the stalled cars. Can’t look at them lest there be drowning people inside. Mid-stream now. Water surging, spraying. The jeep lurches, slips. Already I’m losing breath, lungs filling, brain dying. The last seconds of life before -

  We’re okay. Wheels grip again, push forward, reach the shallows. What is this strange feeling? I’m a hundred metres downstream, soul drifting away from body, losing physical moorings, agony and bliss together. And yet, that’s not what happened. We survived. Solid ground, clear of the current.

  Helen’s falls against me, cold, damp, shaking.

  The jeep is also shaking. Vertigo. Instability. Are we inside the event horizon after all, sliding back into the black-hole? No, it’s not just us – it’s the earth itself. There’s a new sound that goes through bones, sonic equivalent of deep background radiation.

  ‘Look,’ says Daisy, pointing.

  Not a half-mile distant, unstable banks are collapsing into the Suir. The river explodes at the impact of each massive chunk. The effect is spreading upstream and downstream. The forest too, brown and green under the heavy grey skies, is sliding. Not just sections of it, but all of it. The whole hillface coming down, liquefied after so much melted snow and so much rain. Back towards the town, in one rotating motion, the rooftops of Carrickbeg disappear under mingled rock and biomass, unstoppable megatons of sliding surface. Flattened and buried are the sanctuaries of the Friary and St Molleran’s; dead surely are any who returned to their homes. The leading edge of the cataclysm ploughs through the barrier of concrete and masonry close by the quay, slams into the Old Bridge. Five and a half centuries of history buried in a few moments as finally and forever it succumbs to the forces of destruction. Alas too for the Castle, a structure more ancient still. Its walls shall fall, its constituent blocks pile into the Suir. Over decades and centuries to come, these shall to roll into the sea.

  ‘Serves ‘em fucking right,’ Heathshade says.

  We’re away, engine revving, tyres dethreading on the asphalt. And now – crazily – the CD player on. He turns it up loud, beats some metal rhythm on the steering wheel.

  Behind us thousands die. But they belong to a past already gone, no longer part of our world. Best to look forward through the fogging windscreen, down the centre-line of the long, straight road.

  Sixteen miles to Waterford.

  Faintly, a new fear leaks through to my conscious, but stupefaction is my saviour. We’ll be there before my faculties have time to properly regroup.

  MUNDI KAPUT

  She turns in bed, pulling blankets around herself. I can’t lie down for fear I’ll wake her. What’s that she’s whimpering? Don’t know, but I think the pain has seeped deeply enough through to colour her dreams. I don’t know what to do to help, and there’s nothing I can say. Nothing could pass my lips that would not be dishonourably shallow, exhibit self-serving callowness. I don’t know how she feels – that’s the truth of it. I’m like an active sensor probing with waves. I detect something in outline, a target on scope, a looming shadow I don’t properly perceive. A shape with no texture, a mass with no interior. Because unlike her, I don’t have to believe my parents are dead. So it’s better when she sleeps, except that the dawning anguish when her eyes open is all the more terrible.

  I seem to spend most of my time these days looking out the window, hoping faintly that the daylight spectrum will induce dreaminess, clad realness, slow down thought. The morning wind blows a mist off the piled snow at the sides of empty Gracedieu Road. Yesterday afternoon, from this perch, I watched the work gang go about their poor-house task of clearing that snow. A fume-spewing plough laboured slowly up the hill, and the workers, wrapped in fraying brown-grey layers, gasping clouds of drifting white, trudged behind it, shovelling piles this way and that with the perfunctory strokes of hungry men. The soldier overseer let them rest just below this window, went around to each, lit their cigarettes. The soldier called to our door and asked if the men could use the toilet. I was about to let them in when Helen sat up in bed, bloodless white and tear-streaked. The soldier saw her. He understood, led the men instead to the door of the Smyths’ flat.

  Today, more snow is covering the stretch they cleared. The work will have to be done all over again. Those lucky sods from yesterday are probably still asleep in their warmish beds, or eating their hard-earned breakfast. Meanwhile, some other work gang will be led out to slave away from the day. A few days from now it’ll be me doing my ten-hour stint, my mandatory spell of drudgery, all in the name of law and order and fairness. You earn your rations here. That’s the way it works. Not that I’m complaining.

  Time to head out and get our three days’ ration. I close the front door quietly, so as not to unsettle her. I call to the Smyths’ door. Mrs Smyth is expecting me. A decent woman only too happy to check in on Helen while I’m out. ‘Leave her be as much as you can.’ As if I know what I’m talking about.

  The unsteady stairs leads to a cold hallway, thence to the more intense cold of outside - a cold that penetrates like gamma rays. Down the bleak hill I go, boots crunching through the crusted surface. Round the corner on Merchant’s Quay I sense that trouble is afoot. An APC rumbles behind me like a steam gun. Hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

  No, be sensible - it’s what’s happening at the distribution centre that interests them. Never seen so many there at the same time. Soldiers in riot gear pushing people around, trying to get them to queue up properly.

  People are reaching the city from all directions. It seemed to be the return of the cold that triggered it, made people give up on normality. Just get to a fastness of some sort – that seems to have been the universal thought. We were among the lucky ones, arriving during the warm spell, while there was still half a welcome to be got here.

  The first night here was entrancing. A glittering quayside, an urban paradise lit by up by fire and electric lights. Happy multitudes gathered around bonfires. The candles in the windows of the distant buildings were like the thousand stars burning in the sky. We saw and exulted at the dark shapes of heavy military vehicles moving along the quay.

  If a wall could be put up around the city now, I think they’d do it. In fact, I’d help. Better that than more ration reductions. Two hundred grams of cheese, a half litre of milk and a small loaf of bread is not much to sustain two people for three days.

  It’s good to share with the Smyths some evenings. Last time they got cabbage from somewhere, and we’d been handed some black-spotted carrots with our regular food. These we boiled. Combined with some sachet soup, they made a stew of sorts, and we had this with the bread and cheese. The Smyth children became sleepy then and settled on the floor by the fire under a mass of blankets. We listened to distant, foreign radio voices, vague references to faraway upheaval – storms, famine, violence.

  The river froze while still in flood, so that the ice begins in the middle of the road on the quay. Out in the middle of the river, open water still flows. The two fronts of ice are converging. Soon they’ll meet, and it will be possible to walk to the other side of the Suir without recourse to the bridge. Don’t know why one would want to though. There’s nothing over there. No food, no heat, no help, nothing.

  In the window of an estate agent’s office I can see Major Shelton’s desk. No one there. Looks like the office has been abandoned, Shelton’s project shelved. He was sick of the sight of me and Helen by the end. Each day – or several times a day in the case of Helen – he would see one or both of us. He would give is that Not you again look. Had he found any trace of Helen’s parents? No, he hadn’t. If any information came to light, he’d contact us. ‘I haven’t forgotten. If I see their names on the lists, I will tell you. I have your address.’

  Then one day he stood up when he saw us come
in through the door. Helen saw the look on his face, and immediately began to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  And he was genuinely sorry too. I felt for him, this sad and spiritless man, who despite the smart uniform was as lost, as bereft as the rest of us.

  Her parents were found in a basement room in a school, along with about two hundred others. Their house on Casement Road had been empty and looted when we arrived there, and there was nothing to indicate where they had gone. Seems that they went to the school to see out the big storm. Their bodies had been preserved by the cold.

  They would have been something of a burden to us had we found them alive.

  There’s a soldier with a loudhailer – a helmeted officer, middle-aged, tired-looking, ill-tempered. He’s grabbing the tunics of his men, pushing them this way and that, trying to get them organised. They’re less than enthusiastic. Hungry and depressed, I would imagine, although their status brings privileges not given to the common plebeians.

  The officer’s voice filters crackly through the speaker:

  ‘If you’re not on the 8:30 list, leave the area now.’

  They haven’t even fed the 8:30ers yet? Not promising, it being 9:45 now, and me being on the 10:30 list.

  ‘Final warning – ‘

  He means business, this man. He raises his rifle with one hand so that the barrel points to the roofs.

  ‘Those not on the list, get out of the area.’

  A line of soldiers with riot shields and truncheons forms across the width of the street, begins to advance so as to push the mob back. The mob does not like this one bit. Curses and missiles fly. The hotheads advancing on the riot line are dealt with efficiently. Whatever resinous substance the truncheons are made of is unyielding yet resilient.