Bar None (3 page)

We don't know what they are, or where they come from, or what they're doing. But they seem relatively harmless. And sometimes I think they're ghosts, projected there by each of us because we cannot bear seeing the city so still and silent.

Michael does not resemble anything we have seen. I step back as he enters. His shadow passes over my legs just before Jacqueline closes the door, but I feel nothing.

We take him into the dining room and he makes himself at home. Sits, sighs, looks around. He is confident, but there's also an underlying gratitude, a look here and there that says,
I am so glad I found you all
. Perhaps the confidence is a front, but I think not. We all handle survival in our own way, and it seems to me that Michael thinks he is one of the lucky ones.

Cordell and Jessica make dinner, though neither of them stays out of the room for more than a couple of minutes at a time. They don't want to miss anything. We all appreciate that, and while they cook we talk about the Manor, what it was like when we found it, how we managed to stock some food and drink before the plagues hit their worst. None of us mentions how low the stock is running, and though Jessica talks at length about the gardens and how much food she is planting, we all know that it can never be enough.

"So who's in charge?" Michael asks. He looks at me, then away again. Glances at Jessica. His gaze rests on Cordell.

"None of us," Jacqueline says. "We make our decisions as a group. There are stronger ones, and . . . those of us not so strong. But we're all survivors together."

"Yes," Michael says, looking at his hands in his lap. His fingers are entwined. "That's good to hear."

Jessica comes in from the kitchen. "Almost ready," she says. We take our seats around the table, and I wonder whether Michael will expect one of us to say grace.

Cordell and Jessica bring in the food, several steaming pots of vegetables and hot dog sausages with fried onions and mushrooms. The smell is mouth watering, and Michael's eyes go wide. "You really are surviving here," he says.

"We're doing more than that," I say. I look at Cordell and he nods. "Excuse me for a few moments." I leave the dining room and breathe a sigh of relief when I'm on my own once again.

The hallway is quiet, and now that the sun is sinking the shadows stretch out, friendly shapes that I have come to know well over the past few months.
You really are surviving here
, Michael said, and he is right. But I am also remembering. That is what my survival is for me, a process of recollecting and honouring, of creating my life with Ashley over and over again.

I seem to have forgotten so much over such a short space of time, and digging for the memories makes me feel more and more guilty. I still cry, but it's at the idea of my dead wife rather than a particular thought. Walking the gardens, listening to nature, I see and hear only her final moments of pain. Everything else is shadow.

But with a drink in my hand, things change.

I pick up the big torch and go down into the cellar. It's as large as the footprint of the mansion, split into several rooms that are mostly filled with rotten furniture and other junk. But the first room is different, and it's the only one we use. When we congregated here it was fully stocked with dozens of ales and wines, and after that first week it played a big part in our decision to stay. There isn't much left now, but I bring up a crate of the good stuff, a selection of bottles that fills me with an ache of nostalgia and the thrill of knowing that I will soon be remembering Ashley.

I hurry back upstairs, and as I walk into the dining room the subdued chatter ceases.

"I do hope you're not a lager drinker," I say. Michael eyes the bottles as I place them on the table, and grins.

We eat the meal, and drink, and the chat comes easily. He tells us something of where he has been and what he has seen, but for some reason that seems unimportant. As darkness falls outside we move from the dining room to the living room, and Cordell ventures to the basement for more beer. We are all drinking, though we know that supplies are running low. None of us has yet dared voice the fear of what may happen when we run out. I can barely think beyond that day, and I'm sure it is the same for everyone. Beer is our drug, our life, and for many of us our saviour.

Michael seems unconcerned. He says that there is much more of everything. There's something about his eyes that makes me think there's a distance there, some defence—intentional or not—that means he's slightly removed from what he's saying, and how we respond.

Once, I see his eyes turn watery. He looks down at his hands and blinks rapidly for a second or two, as if trying to dislodge a speck of grit. He blinks the tears away.

Relaxing in one of the wide, soft chairs that make the living room our favourite place in the Manor, Michael is the centre of attention and the odd one out. He tells us about how he found the old motorbike idling by the side of the road, petrol tank half-full, and how he turned it off and spent the next six hours searching for its owner. The ditches on either side of the road were empty, as were the fields, and although he found six bodies in a farm building half a mile distant, they were all old and decayed. "And there were fat rats," he says. "Dead cows, skeletal chickens, fat rats."

Someone pops another lid from a bottle of beer, and that metallic snick becomes the mark between one conversation and the next.

Michael mentions that he has seen other people. I pause with a bottle half-raised to my lips. "But they're not like you," he says.

"How do you mean?" I ask. The fire crackles, and a log spits as a bubble of sap explodes. Jacqueline, sitting close to the fire so that there are no shadows about her, reaches out one lazy foot and stomps on the ember sizzling into the carpet.

"Different," Michael says. "Moved on."

I don't like what he is saying, nor his tone of voice, and I ask, "What in the name of fuckery does 'moved on' mean?"

He looks right at me. He has been calm and casual all this time. But now I am the centre of his attention, and it feels as though I am being scrutinised by something massive and way, way beyond my comprehension. "I'm not sure yet," he says. "Isn't that wonderful?"

I look away and take another swig of beer. I close my eyes. The conversation continues, but I think of Michael's watery eyes and the sense that his gaze could bore straight to the centre of my fractured soul.

Theakston's Old Peculier, deep and dark and heavy, a smooth roasty beer with a hint of chocolate and an unmistakeable vinous aftertaste, a
complex
beer, rich and powerful and as familiar to my tongue as the taste of Ashley's skin, the hint of her breath, the tang of sweat on her neck as we make love. Theakston's Old Peculier, the brown bottle still wet and cold even though we had been sitting in Paul's back garden for over an hour, watching him cook and listening to his band's new demo, and Ashley was beside me, drinking her own drink and making me the centre of her universe by never looking at me. That's how I marked the depth of our love: we could be together so completely without touching or saying anything. We breathed the same air.

Paul cooked steak and chicken quarters and pork loin chops on the gas barbeque. I could feel the heat of it from where I sat, but even on that hot summer day it was not uncomfortable. He sprinkled spiced oil over the steak and stood back when a gush of flame licked upward for a few seconds, sealing the meat. The pork was thickly coated in a peanut glaze, slowly bubbling and turning dark.

"You honestly think they'll close it?" Ashley said. We had been talking about the recent outbreak of bird flu in France, and the Prime Minister's comments about closing the channel tunnel. There had been a lot of piss-taking in the media about that: a threat from the skies, so the PM proposes protecting his nation by closing a tunnel beneath the sea. But as ever, Paul had theories about it that seemed to hold water. He spent a lot of time on the 'net, mixing with other conspiracy-theory fanatics and picking up information from sources I wouldn't even know how to find. Most people thought he was plain nuts. I'd known him long enough to know that was not entirely true.

More often than not, Paul was right. Ashley had only known him for as long as she'd known me, almost a year. I believed she was beginning to see what Paul was all about.

"I'm sure they will," he said, turning a steak. "It's just a matter of time. The flu's already jumped from bird to human in fifteen cases. Now if it starts getting passed from person to person, we'll have to take advantage of our island state. And an island doesn't have a direct link to the mainland. The tunnel's always been a bad idea. I know a guy who worked on it, old bloke down the pub, and he and I have had lots of chats about it. It's common knowledge they left the tunnelling machines buried in the walls down there, and most people believe it's because it would have been too expensive to bring them back out."

"And that isn't the reason?" Ashley asked.

Paul shook his head. "'Course not. The real reason is, those machines carry nukes. One code, one button, one finger, and the tunnel is closed forever."

Ashley glanced at me and raised an eyebrow, but I just shrugged.

"You don't believe me?" Paul said.

"It's not that," Ashley said, "it's just that . . . it seems so unlikely."

"Why?" A pork joint was spitting fat and flaming, but Paul's attention was distracted. He hated it when people doubted him. I was one of the few who could see past his fanaticism to the inherent truth in many of his beliefs, and very often that scared me.

"Well, who'd do something like that?"

"The government. The military. Whoever owns them."

"All three?"

"Believe me, sweet cakes, they're all one." Paul went back to cooking, and Ashley moved closer to me so that she could put her hand on my knee.

It turned into one of those afternoons and evenings that you remember forever. At the time it's just another drink, another meal, another long chat with good friends, and you don't perceive the special sheen to the day until much, much later. Then you look back on it and realise that it was one of the days of your life. How could you have not realised what was happening? How can the look in your lover's eye have escaped you, or the sense of peaceful kinship between you and the guy who'd been your friend since you were nine, and who would die thirty years later, just two days before the woman you had loved all that time? But that's the thing about these most special of days: you can't
make
them special. You can't sit there and think to yourself, Right, this is going to be a day I remember forever. They just imprint themselves on your brain: the way your girl looks at you, something your friends says, the taste of a steak, the sensation of getting pleasantly drunk while the world goes on about you. You may forget that day for ten years, but then you'll be grocery shopping, agonising over what to have for dinner, and a particular moment from that day will leap into your head, a snapshot accompanied by an intense emotional recollection. It's as powerful as déjà vu, and you'll say to yourself, Damn, that was a fucking good time! I wish it could all be like that again.

But wishing cannot make it so. And you may think that times are worse than they once were, but you know what? Another ten years on, you'll have a flashback to that shopping trip and the evening that followed it when you ate a good curry and drank Wolf Blass and watched the God-awful remake of
The Haunting
, and that too will become one of the days of your life.

Sometimes days age like a good wine, and only time can make them special.

We offer Michael the bed-settee in the old games room. It's back past the kitchen, tucked in between the utility room and a store room stacked with old, bad family portraits. Michael is grateful, and as he stands to wish us goodnight I think he sheds a tear. "Goodnight," he says, and I nod. The Theakston's has made a blur of my senses. I like that.

He leaves the room, and we all fall quiet as we hear his footsteps retreat along the hallway.
He must feel very uncomfortable
, I think.
Waiting to hear us start talking about him
. But something strange happens: none of us begins. The room remains silent but for the spit and crackle of logs settling in the fire.

I rise at the same time as Cordell. "I'm hitting the sack," I say. I smile at the others and leave the room. I think back to that long-ago time with Ashley in Paul's back garden, and remember the day twelve months ago when an explosion ripped the channel tunnel apart, killing thousands and making Britain an island once again. It had not worked, of course. Paul had called me that very evening to say he'd found a sore on his chest.

I walk upstairs, listening to the resounding silence of the people I have come to think of, very quickly, as the last friends I will ever have. And I wonder whether I will live long enough for this to become one of the days of my life.

I meet Jessica on the landing. I am the only one who still tries to talk to her about her past, and sometimes she smiles, offering a phrase or two that paints a bare outline of what she might have been through. I know she's a long way from home. She cycled here, she says she left no one behind. And usually she seems strong.

On the landing, just before she really acknowledges my presence, I see a flash of something in her eyes that I can't quite make out. Perhaps it's madness, or maybe it's fear; both terrify me.

"What do you think?" I ask.

"I think I'm tired."

"But Michael?"

Jessica shrugs. She does that a lot, and I've come to see it as something of a shield, a silent answer that gives nothing away.

"He says things are moving on," I say. And there's that flash in Jessica's eyes again as she turns around and goes to her room.

When I close my door and lean against it, I listen for crying. But all I hear is silence.

"Wake up."

There's a hand on my forehead. It's cool and comforting, and for a while I am not in the awful here and now. I'm not sure where I am exactly, but it feels safe. It feels
different
. There's no smell or sight to recognise, but I'm in a place where loved ones don't die of a virulent virus out of Africa, and where there's always another bottle of beer in the cupboard, the shop, the brewery. I think of Paul's comment after he rang to tell me he'd found a sore.
The irony of it really grabs my shit. Africa: the cradle of civilisation, and the coffin of its demise. If I thought the world would be here long enough, maybe I'd write a book
.