The Fox
Foreword
I don’t exactly know why we are still at war with America. The television is apparently always telling me though newsreaders and MPs and chiefs-of-police, and my television is always on, but I have it on mute. I like to see their mouths open and close like fish in a tank, watch the shapes of lies on their lips without hearing. The people who might explain it to me “don’t really want to go into it” and besides, I already know I’m a traitor, especially now.
The practical upshot of the war- the effect on us, the people- is that nobody trusts anybody, except perhaps John Goodnight, though most people have never heard of him. The Directory doesn’t trust the people [especially Londoners]; because they think we’re all helping the Americans, which we sometimes are. The people [especially Londoners] don’t trust the Directory, because they shoot us for a number of things, helping Americans being one of them. Then there are groups of people who take ruining the War Effort a little more seriously than most, like the Dame and her Free Army, and Goodnight, and the other groups I couldn’t list here, though none of those trust each other either because they are so patently different.
Another part of the War Effort is the rations, and that isn’t very easy to explain either. I’m making a hash of this, but bear with me. There’s a big blockade around Britain, and the only things that are supposed to go in or out are the troops [though there are loads of little boats coming and going all the time from Calais, taking those who can afford it out of the country and bringing in a great supply for the Black Market, idiot immigrants and a few spies] meaning that everything is in limited supply. Add to this a peculiar government that wishes its citizenry to be disciplined even in its nutrition, and we get even water being rationed. When the snow came and we first started scraping it up to put in our kettles, the water ration was tightened, forming an imaginary shortage that only doctors can get past.
I find now that after this confusing and insufficient explanation I am suppressing the urge to tell everything to you, reader, all the stories, all at once. But have to tell you what it was like living here in the worst time possible, because otherwise you won’t understand why I acted as I did last Winter, or why my friends did. I could tell you about the events leading up to the government becoming the way it is now, about how very slowly our rights were removed until America felt it needed to act, and how we all waited impatiently for the war to start. If I did that, this book would read like a cross between 1984 and a history textbook on Hitler’s rise to power. I’d list all the little laws and the riots, give their dates, remember some anecdotes to fit them. It would be made into a documentary shown every Christmas, and every family would have a copy on their bookshelves that they never read. The thing is, I’m sure someone else is doing that who wants to do it. I want someone else to do it.
Instead, I’ll tell you what we thought. We thought every single man in a uniform was evil, and every single MP and everyone on the television. The police, the parliament, the panellists, and the paragon public were all in league with the enemy as far as we knew, and we didn’t exactly know who our enemy were.
Chapter One
I had known Fr. John Goodnight for a long while before he started asking me favours. Back then I got to call him “John”, and I was a bit of a wonder boy to him, or so I liked to think. Doing him a favour was for me a privilege as Goodnight was a kind of hero of mine: he the kind of man who was everyone’s hero without their noticing it; he wasn’t arrogant enough to actively want to want to inspire people [though I think he hoped he might]; but he did anyway, and I wasn’t the only one susceptible to his powers. I find it funny to think that when I publish this people will probably think I was in love with him; I think I might have been in a platonic sort of way, but if I was there were a lot of other people who were.
His face was, according to people I have asked to verify, not an unhandsome one, but I think if you had to describe it in one word it would be “kind” rather than “attractive”. I suppose it wouldn’t matter, his being a priest. He had a slightly careworn, ruddy complexion, dark brown hair with a lot of grey in it and sharp grey-blue eyes with crows-feet. The eyes were the focus of his face in a way unlike anyone else I have ever seen, deep-set and piercing and large and sad at the same time. It was hard to deny such an honest face anything.
It was late November from what I recall on the road outside the church, when the snow hadn’t melted in about three weeks, when John Goodnight asked me to go and meet an American. She’d come on the ferry, like an idiot, to pick up her brother, and she needed taking to his house whilst he was out doing a funeral. Goodnight’s place was a safe house for Americans, which I suppose means that he was a traitor, though traitor is a strange word, so I shouldn’t use it.
“Will you do this for me, Emil?” he asked the question quietly,
“Of course.”
We chatted for a while longer, and I started to leave him
“I can rely on you, then, to be at the George?” He smiled, though he was spectre-serious.
“Definitely.” I worked there at the time.
“Right. Well, this might be a little more difficult than you think. This girl’s parents are dead.”
“Oh God,” I said, because that is what you’re supposed to say, but I wasn’t surprised. Plenty of people had died. On the night after the referendum, hundreds of American immigrants had been killed on the spot. Goodnight, being a priest, wasn’t in favour of this action, and since then had vowed to protect as many Americans as he could. A few people, like me, tried to help him sometimes, but we couldn’t help but think that one day we’d never see him again. I suppose that made us love him more. But I was keeping him in suspense. He wore a look of anticipation in his tightened jaw. “Yes, I’ll still do it.”
“Thanks a lot. I’d better be off then. Two hours!” He pronounced the exclamation mark without raising his voice, like a stage whisper. He had a very quiet voice.
I walked towards the pub with my scarf strangled around my neck for that bit extra warmth. It was so cold I sighed with the relief when I realised the pub door was “push” instead of “pull” because I didn’t have to take my hands out of my pockets.
The George has a low, dingy ceiling and benches like church pews. It smells of beer-soaked towels and wood, and the men inside have perpetual stubble while the women have red faces and drink Guinness. When I worked there, there was a real fly problem, and we had to have this zapper in the kitchen and outside the lounge to try and get them. Even when the snow came, they just wouldn’t die. I suppose they were adapting. Evolving. They were better at this than us.
When she came in, she looked so unlike the other customers I was afraid everyone would immediately know something was up. She looked around her, ordered a vodka and orange and sat at the bar, looking from me to the other barmen, probably trying to work out which of us it was. She eventually settled on me, probably because I looked so young. All of the people in the resistance are young. We think differently, we’re better at dealing with these kinds of situations, and most of us don’t mind if there’s a price on our heads because there already was one. Because I was so young, she smiled at me, too. I was nineteen.
“Let’s go back to John’s house, see what he’s got for you. You can both stay there, he says, until he can finds you a safe house.”
“But that’s pretty hard.”
“It’s not as hard as you might think, but no, it’s not easy.” I’d slipped into my professor-tone, not exactly patronising but now she was beginning to realise my age didn’t effect how much I knew about the resistance. “John will be the person who can find out the easiest, because he does nothing but help people. Nothing illegal, apart from the holy water and helping people like you.”
“The holy water?”
“Oh, that’s what we call gin around here. Everyone does. Everyone knows John, you see.”
“I don’t understand why people would rename gin because of an alcoholic priest.”
I think my mouth twisted unattractively before I spoke. Of course John wasn’t an alcoholic. “He isn’t. Basically, since the water rations, he hasn’t had enough water for his baptisms, and there are quiet a few nowadays, you know, people coming to faith before the Apocalypse comes. He gets a Black Market dealer called Punch to bring him his legal alcohol allowance but as a matter of fact the bottles are filled with water, and that’s just how he gets more. The police look at the bottles and think it’s gin when they look through the bottles, and of course Punch says he ‘doesn’t them to break the seals, so no they can’t have a sniff’.”
“Kind of a reverse bootlegger, this man Punch?”
“I suppose he is to John, but he is a bootlegger to others.”
We were trudging through the snow, and a small hole in my shoe was making my sock very wet and cold. I couldn’t feel my foot properly, so I was walking very strangely, tapping it against walls and steps and railings to feel the numbness properly. I received a few strange looks from Asha and we broke into silence for a moment.
“Will my brother be at John’s house already?”
“Hmm?” I’d been thinking about how much shoes would be if punch got me a contact. “No, John’s looking after him himself. He didn’t want to leave the boy by himself.” I felt strange using the word ‘boy’. I was only seven years older than him.
“He’s a good guy.”
“That’s a bit of an Americanism. Be careful with that.”
“British people say ‘guy’ all the time!”
“Yes, but you aren’t going to. You’re going to come out with things like, ‘John’s a good bloke’ or ‘fellow’ or ‘chap’.”
“Not ‘chap’, surely. That sounds really fake.”
“I agree, but you know what I mean.”
“How’s my accent?”
“It’s a bit Dick Van Dyke, but it’ll get better now you’re actually in London.” We had reached the house, and I pushed the nine-digit-code: ANODOMINI.
Mark followed the MP, whose name was Edward Oliver, until he tired of him.
There are certain rules one quickly learns about following people: one is that, unlike in film noir, you don’t stop if they stop, even if you pass them. There are some things you do do the same as your quarry- for example when you go up steps together and you don’t want to be heard [sometimes you do] you step at the same time as them so you don’t make an obvious sound. Most of the other things you learn from being followed yourself. The police used to follow me all the time, so I just got better at following -the whole thing- being followed is a reasonably easy thing to get out of if you know how to yourself. If you ever want to get out of being followed find a public street that isn’t too long, preferably with loads of people [if it’s nighttime I know it can’t be helped, I always used to walk to the centres of nightlife or the red light district. Then if it were the police they got distracted anyway.] the moment you realize. Don’t give it away, otherwise you force them to take an action, and more often than not they don’t want to do that. So, you take your chosen street and you walk up and down some to verify that you are indeed being followed [I’ve often checked this way and found I was just being paranoid]. If passing them twice doesn’t freak them out enough to stop, a cheery “Good Morning!” should do it nicely. If they’re still doing it, they’re pretty dangerous and you’re screwed, but you can take them by surprise in confrontation. Lead them to a shop window. That way, you not only get shoppers staring at the commotion, but the people from inside the shop. Alternatively, turn two corners away from the hustle and bustle and shoot them, or at least give them something to think about.
Edward Oliver wore a yellowy scarf, the colour of white wine held up against a white table cloth, and aside from his tweed flat-cap he was fairly well-camouflaged against the snow. It was about eight in the morning and the shops were throwing hot water onto their doorsteps to make them seem more appealing. Mark dwelled on the waste of this water for a few minutes, but didn’t take his eyes off Oliver. He readjusted his scarf so that it now draped over his shoulder at a particular angle, like ivy. Mark wanted to witness him doing something evil there and then, like stand on a homeless man’s fingers or something, but he didn’t. He just went in a house. Mark stationed himself under a lamppost about fifty yards away and to one side so that he wasn’t visible from the windows. Oliver didn’t come out, and after half an hour Mark become too cold to wait any longer, and went to the railway.
Mark worked at the railway station, in one of the rooms built onto the track so he could see the traffic lights and turn them off. It was dirty and small, and nearly empty. There was a chair with a spongy cushion to sit on, a desk with a set of drawers and a kettle. You had to fill it yourself, of course. In the desk drawers he kept two bottles of whisky, and he’d drink and smoke all day long. It was a wonder that the trains never had a crash under his supervision. I think the only reason he remained employed was because he never came into contact with anyone. He came in early, signed his attendance card for the day, and went back onto the street to climb the metal steps up to his “fume cupboard” as he called it.
Nobody spoke to him unless he did something noticeably wrong, and he never did. See, Mark had an encyclopaedic memory. He knew exactly what time the trains came and went. To him, the sun rose and set, snow was white, and the Liverpool came in at 14:36.
I came around the corner with Mark and saw Punch loitering around the doorway of an old bank, closed now. He was wearing his red scarf which subtly signified the reason for his being there.
“Evening, Punch,” we chorused.
“Good evening- Jesus!” We stopped and watched as a fox darted across the road in the direction of the George’s bins. It got up on its hind legs and knocked the bin lid away with its nose and started to eat what was in there. It was in its winter coat, which made it look old and greying, and fairly large. Though quite common, none of the company had seen one so close, and the way its orange eyes sparkled in the light made it look a monster, with its long thin legs stood up like a man.
“Fucking hell, that’s terrifying,” said Mark, voicing all of our opinions, “It looks like the Devil.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said I, with a confidence I didn’t feel. I pulled out the only piece of knowledge I had about foxes. “They can’t even bare their teeth.”
“Can’t they?”
“No, they don’t have the muscles for it in their face.”
“It’s still looks like it’s been eating dead bodies,” said Mark firmly.
“It probably has,” replied Punch, who had come to stand by us. After a moment, the fox pulled something around the size of a rolled up newspaper from the bin and it disappeared around an alleyway. The timing of Punch’s comment made us all think it was part of a human arm, and I couldn’t shake the image of it. A child’s arm, perhaps, shot by the police and then scavenged on by whatever could live out in the snow- foxes, rats, flies.
“At least it’s better than rats. I hate rats.”
“Once I saw a rat the size of a dog swim in the river.” By this point I was hardly listening to them. The fox had reminded me of something, and I couldn’t think what, and then Punch had distracted me.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a dog?”
“The tail was too long and thin.”
“A cat, then, surely.”
“Nope, it was a rat. No cat is that disgusting.”
“Well, I what I was saying about rats, I hate them, because I used to live in an old theatre and there use to be loads of rats, and all the women I lived with got me to sort them out, and once one bit me.”
“D’you get rabies?” This brought my attention to Mark. We both stared at him for a moment.
We spoke at the same time:
“You’re an idiot, you know that?” “Of course he didn’t get rabies.”
Mark didn’t speak for a while after that.
Mark sometimes scared me. There’s one such incident, I can’t recall of them, but this is what happened, or how Mark understood it. He had to tell me afterwards, with great shame at what I called his “crashes”.
Mark didn’t drink as much at my house, and was prone to severe withdrawal symptoms at times. He’d throw up, become very depressed, and get the shakes. That was fairly normal for any alcoholic. Then there was his occasional bouts of paranoia, which when combined with the idea that he had violently killed a man, were unsurprising, though occasionally dramatic. This one night he woke up, absolutely certain that there were policemen lined up on the tracks outside the window, pointing their guns at him.
Feeling that if he didn’t move that instant, he would most likely be killed, Mark rolled over to the other side of the bed and onto the floor. He crawled out of the room commando style, pointing a mimed gun at them. Mark said it was like becoming scared playing a game of make-pretend Haunted Houses he’d made up himself. He knew he wasn’t holding a gun, but for some reason, he thought the police behind the window would be fooled. Perhaps he thought the silhouette would suffice for a weapon.
He crawled through to the kitchen to better look through the window, and to see the clock on the oven. It read 11:45. He waited, lying under the window in the blind spot form the guns, for the midnight Dover-bound train to crush them. His back was deathly cold, but he was sweating. He needed a drink. He was convinced that as long as the policemen didn’t hear his shaking [they would know that he was in the kitchen by now, after all they had seen him roll off the bed; where else would he go?] they would stand there until the train came and die.
He had closed his eyes, because the water in them was cold, when he heard the train approaching. The bedrooms in my house were insulated enough to keep some of the noise out, but the kitchen didn’t even have double-glazed glass, to the noise was deafening whenever a train passed. Lying against both the wall and the floor, Mark could feel his bones rattle in his body. The noise started as a low rumble, then a rhythm could be distinguished, and then he heard the high screaming note of the steel wheels and the wires. He listened for the policemen jumping to their deaths trying to escape, and heard none. He supposed there hadn’t been time- they were focused on their vigil. The noise became unbearable, and he opened his eyes just in time to witness the blinding flash of the windows of the carriage lighting up the room. The shriek hiccupped a few times as the separate carriages skipped over a stone on the rails. Mark wept to himself, mourning the men who had not been sent to kill him.
The train finally passed after sixteen carriages, and Mark stood up quickly, making himself dizzy. He parted the blinds further with his mimed gun and looked out to see the remains of the men. He didn’t expect to see bodies, they’d have been carried further up the track, but he was looking for blood in the snow. There was none.
It was at around this time that I heard him moaning and got out of bed to see him drinking some vodka. He pointed his mimed gun at me for a second, then realised what he was doing, and released his little- and ring-finger, so that he was just putting his hand out. His arm dropped after a moment, and he slowly drank his glass. His eyes were bright and wild, and I stayed frozen to the spot, watching a bead of sweat which twinkled at me before dropping into the darkness and out of sight.
“Why are you leaving me, Punch?”
“Why do I want to go to Paris? Aside from this place going to pot? Well, you know, before I ended up here, before the referendum, I used to live in an old theatre.” Big Ben smiled at him, and he smiled sadly back. “It was in Brighton with a dozen other people-we were all whores of course, but we looked after each other, eight girls and four boys. We used to buy candles to save on the electricity, pretending it was extra-romantic. We sometimes pretended we were a real theatre and would a show on as long as the official play people didn’t come and stop us. They paid, too.” There was a pause as Big Ben frowned, trying to know exactly what he was on about. Punch’s voice had gone quiet, which was very unlike him. “We used each other’s bath water to recycle it when the rations came. And, you know what I think? I think those people were my family, and I never realised. After the referendum shootings most of them fled to Paris. In my profession, any strong politics are bad- people just try to get rid of us to suit the new government. They all went, one after the other, and I was the last one to leave. I loved London back then. And I’ve got to find them, basically. I’ve got to find them. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Are you saying you’re going because there are other people you care about, and you have to go and see to their whereabouts before we can be together?”
“No, Ben. I’m saying I’m going to find them, and I probably won’t, but I’m going to look for them, and I’m probably not coming back. I’m not coming back to you.”