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Seven: Holy Grail Ale

Ashley was crying again, her hair catching the glow of sunlight through the open window blinds, and this would be one of the days of my life. I went to her and held her as I always did at times like this. And as always, there was nothing I could say.

Later, we drove out into the country to one of our favourite pubs. We listened to Thin Lizzy on the stereo, their classic Live and Dangerous album, and we were both silent as Lynott gave his perfect rendition of "Still in Love with You." Our windows were down, our spirits rising, and Ashley rested her hand on my thigh as I drove. I touched the back of her hand now and then, but the country lanes were narrow and twisty, and I spent a lot of time changing gears.

When we reached the pub and parked, Ashley turned to me and said, "Everything's going to be all right." She smiled. And even though her eyes were still rimmed red from crying, I believed her.

It was cool, but we kept our jackets on and sat outside, listening to the tinkle of their old water feature. There was a main road half a mile away and the background hum of traffic was constant, but it still felt quite peaceful here. It was early evening, so there weren't many customers yet. We had a corner of the garden to ourselves.

Ashley went in to buy a drink, and she came out with two bottles of Black Sheep Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale and pint glasses. I smiled, but my stomach fell. A novelty beer such as this surely couldn't taste very good.

I was wrong. It was a nice pint—pale amber, light and fruity, subtly bitter and dusty at the end—and the bottle labels gave us a laugh.

Ashley sat beside me, eschewing eye contact for the sake of closeness.

"So what are we going to do?" she asked.

"Sit here and drink some more."

She nudged me. "We have yet to toss a coin to see who's driving home."

I shrugged, looked around, let the setting sun warm my face. "Fuck it," I said. "Let's stay here and call a cab later."

"Sounds good," she said, but she drifted off and became contemplative. Ran her finger around the rim of her glass. I knew she had meant something different. "So," she said after a minute or two, "what are we going to do?"

I stroked her back. "What do you want to do?"

"We could adopt," she said.

"Really?"

"I don't know."

I took a drink and sighed. "Well, it's something to think about."

Ashley and I were very good at talking. We knew each other so well, knew how to pitch a conversation, when to start or when to stop. That evening we spent chatting about many inconsequentialities, the sort of things couples often talk about when they spend time relaxed together. Music, films, sex, food, sex, and sex. But all the while, interspersed through our casual conversation like a lifeline through an avalanche of experience, we kept coming back to the subject at hand: Ashley could not have children, and we were faced with the first real challenge of our relationship.

"I want to do you from behind later," I said.

"If you're lucky."

"If you're lucky."

She laughed and took a drink. "Long as you let me sit on your face first."

"Hmmm . . . that's a tough one."

She laughed again, finished her drink, tapped the glass along the tabletop and listened to the different notes it made. "Imagine a future without anything of us in it," she said. "No genes of ours. Not even any ideas. No one who'll lie awake at night and think about us, about all the good times we gave them through their childhood."

"We adopt, it still won't be our genes," I said. "It never can be."

Ashley tapped the glass harder. "Well, that's not what's important. It's memory that's important. If no one carries our memory when we die, then we really are dead."

I thought about that for a while, and I didn't like what she said. I saw the stark truth of it. No children, no fond memories of us as kind parents or doting grandparents. Our friends would remember us until they died, and perhaps their children would occasionally talk of the nice couple their mum and dad used to spend time with, nice but a little sad too. Because we would become sad, I knew. However much we loved each other and supported each other through this, we would become sad.

"So we adopt," I said.

"It's not that easy."

"There are agencies, people who help."

She looked at me and smiled, leant forward and kissed me full on the lips. "I don't mean that," she said.

I went to get more drinks, and when I came back Ashley was knelt down beside the pub's garden pond. I could see a swathe of her bare back, and the top of her thong peeked above her shorts. I handed her a glass and squatted behind her, nudging against her so she could feel how turned on I was. "Definitely from behind," I whispered, aware now that the garden was filling with patrons.

"If you're lucky," she said.

"If you're lucky."

We drank some more, ate a small bar snack, called a cab and went home. We were drunk, and we became quite heated in the back of the taxi. No kissing or ripping of clothes, but my hand rested at the top of her thigh, my little finger massaging between her legs and feeling the heat of her there. And half a mile from home she casually unzipped my jeans and let my erection spring free. I had to continue responding to the driver's banter as she stroked me, and when we stopped I somehow managed to get to our front door without being seen.

It was one of those days I remembered forever. But we never had children, and we never did adopt, and now so many memories are mine and mine alone.

 

I sit astride the bike, kick it to life and watch the shapes coming closer. There are a dozen of them. They're people, faces blank, dirty, shorn of civilisation. Their clothes are old but not too ragged, and each of them carries a strange weapon. I see no guns, but there are sharpened bed posts, umbrellas spiked with nails, a child's plastic doll embedded with rusty razor blades. It's as if these people are hefting the dead past as a weapon.

I'm unsettled, nervous, but not scared. Ashley is with me now, and she always will be. Those remains up in the bedroom are not her. By coming here I have lifted her memory away from that room of death and placed it firmly in my mind, unlocking a million doorways and leaving them ready to be opened. Whether I do that whilst alive or dead does not matter.

I rev the bike and the shapes pause. They exchange glances, but nothing seems to pass between them. And in that moment my fear breaks through, and I begin to make out more details.

The shapes are wearing more than clothes. One of them has a necklace of yellowed bones. Another seems to have a face covered in sharp white spots, and they could be embedded teeth. One girl—she can't be more than thirteen—has a skull protruding above her head, tied on with a couple of leather belts. The skull has a smashed jaw and several obvious fractures. The girl does not smile or frown. She is as expressionless as her gruesome decoration.

There's more, but I don't want to see. I rev the bike again and try to judge whether I can make it past them. They're spread out across the road, advancing in a clumsy, slow line, and I suppose I could ride straight through them. But even though they appear slow and apathetic now, they still have weapons. I imagine the blade-strewn doll being thrown at my face when I'm going twenty miles per hour.

Something draws my attention upward, and a shadow slips across the sky. It glides, swoops, flits from here to there without really making itself known. I squint against the bright sky but that does not make seeing it any easier. Just like back in the city near the Manor. Seen from a distance, those flying things we were content to leave alone. It's closer now, and though I still can't make it out—or perhaps I'm too scared to admit what it is—I'm now in its domain.

And then there's a noise from farther away, louder and more violent than the deathly shuffles of these lost people. A gunshot, the scream of an engine struggling to overcome some obstacle, a shout. I turn my head slightly so that I can hear more, and the shapes before me screech.

They run at me. All pretence at lethargy now broken, I'm more shocked than I should be. I kick the bike into gear but my foot slips on the clutch, I tip sideways, and my knee takes all the weight as I lever myself upright again, twisting the throttle, leaving a line of hot rubber on the ground behind me, aiming across the street at the timber front gate of the Barkers' garden. My only advantage now is that I know the lie of the land here, and in those shapes' once-blank faces I haven't seen anyone I recognise.

Once-blank, because now they're twisted into expressions of pure hunger, and hate.

I stand slightly as the bike bumps over the low kerb. The Barkers' gate smashes open, hinges squealing. A woman tries to grab me as I enter the front garden. Her fingers curl through a cloth loop on my jacket's shoulder and I throw all my weight forward, changing into second gear and hauling on the throttle. For a moment I think I'm going to be pulled backward from the bike—I'm sure the woman is actually being dragged along behind me—then she screams and falls free.

I glance back to see the others trampling over the woman as they pursue me. She's shouting something that sounds like, "Davey! Davey!"

I steer beside the house, slowing slightly so that I can step the bike along the narrow path between the garage and boundary hedge. The hedge has blossomed and expanded, and I have to use the bike's power to pull me past the grasping, tangled branches. The people are close again as I burst into the Barkers' back garden, and I give them a face full of exhaust fumes as I power the bike at the back gate. This one is also made of wood but it's stronger, the locks better maintained, and at the last second I realise my mistake. I lean back, the bike's front wheel strikes the gate, and I'm thrown forward and up as the bike rises onto its front wheel.

I end up sprawled on the ground at the base of the fence, motorbike idling on its side beside me, and by some miracle I haven't been crushed. I shake my head, dizzied by an impact I can't even remember.

Another flying thing passes directly over the garden, too fast to see. It leaves a hint of jasmine on the air, and below that a smell I don't want to recognise.

There's a triumphant whoop and the people run at me. "Eating tonight!" one of them screeches. It could even be the young girl. Her eyes are wide, the injured skull waving wildly above her head as she runs.

There's a roar behind the fence, the explosion of a car horn being leant on, and the people pause, staring up over my head.

A shotgun fires. The woman with the teeth embedded in her face crumples, her mouth a circle of shock as the front of her dress turns wet. Her hands go to the wound, and inside.

The gate is kicked open and there is Cordell, hauling at my arms, shouting at me to stand. I see panic on his face, and fear, and anger as well, because I've dragged them into this situation and as far as he's concerned there was no need.

"Come on, come on!"

"The bike," I say.

"Fuck the bike!"

"I'm taking it."

"Leave the bike," a gruff voice says, and one of the men takes a quick run toward us. The shotgun roars again and his shoulder explodes. He goes down, arm flapping.

"I'm taking the bike," I say to Cordell. I'm standing, my legs and arms work, and that's good enough for me.

"Fuck's sake," he says quietly, and I can see all the anger now. He glances up at the sky, down again. "Your choice. Follow us, then. It's not pretty out there, and we won't stop for you on the way out."

"Thanks for coming," I say.

Cordell giggles, a frightening sound. "Thanks for the invite!" He giggles again, then helps me lift the bike.

The people are standing in a line from the side of the Barkers' house to where the man with the shattered shoulder writhes on the ground. They're not looking at us anymore. They're looking at the man, and the woman with the wound in her stomach. Staring at them. Their faces are not quite as blank as before they had charged me, though the violence seems to have gone from them. I see hunger.

 

Cordell is right, it's not pretty out there. I ride between the Range Rovers, so I don't see everything that goes on. But the shotgun fires several more times, I hear the impact of bodies against metal, and three times I have to veer quickly as a crushed body appears from beneath the vehicle ahead of me. Once I ride straight over a man, unable to avoid him without crashing the bike into a lamp post. He screams as I wheel across his already crushed stomach. I even say sorry.

Looking to the left and right I can see people standing along the side of the street. Not many of them—maybe a dozen between my cul-de-sac and where the houses stop before the motorway—but they all look similar to those that had attacked me. Still human, but only just. Desperate. Hungry.

I know what they were after, but I can barely acknowledge it, not right now. It'll take time to sink in. If these are the things Billy and Lucy have locked in that ambulance, what do they intend doing with them?

More shapes flit by above us. None of them come any lower, none attack. I'm being to wonder whether they're really there.

 

With violence and screaming we leave Newport behind, drive onto the motorway and make our way as far from there as we can. I'm cold, even though the sun is still warming my skin. I've been stupid. But everywhere I look, every scene I take in, is tinged now with a memory of Ashley. After six months I feel the grief beginning to hit home. I can't help smiling.

 

"Fucking idiot!" the Irishman says. He doesn't shout and rage, and in a way that's worse. This is a very controlled anger.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I had to go, to see."

"Because of what that nut case said?"

"No, not really because of that at all."

We are milling around the vehicles while Cordell and Jessica change a flat tyre on the lead Range Rover. The old tyre has several nails embedded in it, probably picked up in the city. Something else I feel responsible for.

"Don't pick on him," Jacqueline says. "This is strange for all of us."

"Strange? Did you see those people back there? What they wore, what they carried?"

"They haven't moved on like we have," I say. "Michael said they'd be out here."

"Yes, but he didn't suggest we go looking for them."

"I'm sorry," I say again. I've already thanked them all for coming after me, and I don't want to lessen my gratitude by belabouring it.

The Irishman shakes his head, runs his fingers through his hair. "So, find what you went looking for?"

"Yes," I say.

"Good." He walks away, and I can tell that his anger is already abating.

"Fixed," Cordell says. "Let's go. We can make another few miles before sunset. Then I think we should camp. What do you all think?"

"Good idea," Jacqueline says. She glances at me and smiles, and I mount the motorbike.

We're riding away from the setting sun, and it throws my long, reaching shadow before me.

 

Later, parked beside the toll booths before the Severn Bridge, we all sit in one of the Range Rovers to eat. Conversation returns to Billy and Lucy, and Cordell mentions that he caught a glimpse inside their metal container. "Like an armoury in there," he says. "Guns and boxes of stuff everywhere."

"It's what was in the ambulance that interests me," Jessica says.

Jacqueline shakes her head. "Not me. Don't want to know. Not me."

"I wonder what they're really doing there," I say.

"Waiting for someone," Cordell says.

The Irishman snorts. "Strange place to wait."

"Close to the city, so they can drive in quickly," I muse. "Close to the motorway for a quick escape."

Cordell nods. "And enough weapons to fight a small war."

"Wonder where they found them," Jessica says.

We drift into silence, eat, sharing an occasional nervous glance. But most of the time we look outside.

During the hour it took us to drive from Newport to where we are camped, we saw wolves on the hillsides, something larger—a bear, the Irishman said—splashing in an irrigation ditch, and a minibus stalled in the middle of the road with blood and bones decorating its insides. No disease deaths there. Cordell swears he saw teeth and claw marks on some of the bones when he went to investigate. The rest of us stayed away.

"Well, we're moving on," Jessica says, breaking the silence with a sigh.

"Aren't we just." I think of the things Michael said, and I too wonder at the true identity of those things inside the ambulance. More of the mad, hungry people from the city, or something else?

And were there more of them on the prowl?

 

We cross the Severn Bridge and drive another fifteen miles that evening. The light is good and the sky is clear, so we decide that it would be wiser to move while we can. "The sooner we get to Bar None, the better," the Irishman says. As I'm riding the bike—battered from its two recent spills, but still functioning perfectly well—I wonder whether that's the case at all.

None of us really know what we'll find when we get there.

We stop eventually on the hard shoulder, camouflaging the vehicles between a succession of broken-down and burnt-out lorries. Cordell finds an empty cattle truck and we agree that, with its viewing slots, it's an ideal place to camp.

So begins our first night away from the mansion in six months.

As the sun goes down, the first strange sounds rise.

 

Since my teens, I've loved listening to the countryside at night. There are very few areas where you can still really do that without the background hum of civilisation intruding. There's always a distant road that carries cars and lorries late into the night, a train track that supports midnight transports between factories and foundries, or the noises of a town asleep. A sleeping town is like a sleeping person; it rumbles and clicks, snores and groans. Electric lines hum. Cats howl, fight and rut. Vehicles tick as they cool down, and there's always a TV or radio keeping some insomniac or night-shift worker company while their family sleeps nearby.

It's very, very rare to hear nature at its rawest. I used to think I could. I occasionally drove out into the country at night, sometimes with Ashley, more often on my own, and I thought I'd found a few places where wilderness still survived. Places where the touch of humanity had yet to reach: on top of a hillside, past the end of a track in the local forest, deep in one of the valleys of mid-Wales. I sat away from my car, stared at a sky unpolluted by artificial light, and listened. And I thought I heard a nature that was, for a time, ignorant of humanity.

Sitting in the cattle truck beside civilisation's clogged tarmac artery, I realise how wrong I was. This is nature. This is the natural order of things, without the influence of humanity to weigh things down or scare them into silence. Perhaps some of the creatures we hear outside were born into a world without people, offspring of animals that lived through the plagues and celebrated by giving birth to their first truly free descendants. Perhaps many of them are older that that, but in the six months since the end of humanity's reign on the planet they have forgotten how things used to be. Whatever the case, the night is filled with howls, growls and cries of freedom; things hunting and mating, stalking and eating.

"They've forgotten we're here," Jessica says.

"Good," says Jacqueline.

"I recognise some of them," the Irishman says. "But not all."

"Fox," I say, and it sounds like a screaming baby.

"Badger."

A creature coughs and barks nearby, perhaps as close as the ditch bordering the adjacent field. "Dog?" Jessica asks.

"Maybe." I shrug. "There must be thousands gone feral."

"Always had it in them," the Irishman says. "Never trusted a fucking canine in my life. They fooled us with their puppy-dog eyes, their begging, their rolling over to play dead. All they ever wanted was our meat." He grins at me and starts to snicker.

"You're a bad movie trailer," I say, and the two of us laugh. Nobody else seems amused, because that really doesn't sound like any dog we've heard before. It's a bark that says something, rather than just a shout to get our attention.

"Do you think they know we're here?" Jacqueline says. She stands at the edge of the cattle truck and looks out through one of the slits. I used to hate these vehicles when I was a kid, seeing all those sheep or cows crammed in on their way to be slaughtered or sold. They always looked so helpless in there, the lucky ones able to stick their noses out through the slits to catch one final breath of freedom before their skulls were holed.

"I'm sure they do," Jessica says. "They'll smell us."

Jacqueline looks for a full minute before sitting with us again. She hugs her jacket tight around her shoulders and crossed arms. "I can't see anything."

Something lands on the roof of the truck and scampers across the metal, the sound ending as the creature leaps and lands on the soft grass verge with a low thump. It snickers and runs away.

"I need a drink," I say. The others nod and agree in hushed tones, and Jessica and the Irishman open two bottles of wine. Cordell hands out some plastic cups and we each have a cupful of good Merlot. I drain mine quickly. Never was one to sip wine and appreciate its delicate aroma, dance of flavours, full body. Sometimes, I just want to get drunk.

"I've got a couple of beers in my bag," the Irishman says. He smiles at me, nods, and hands me a bottle. "Knew you'd appreciate that." It's Summer Lightning, rich and full of the taste of sunshine.

"Thanks," I say. "You're sure?"

"Wine's good for me," the Irishman says, and the others nod and agree.

Damn, I wish I knew his name! I smile and take the bottle opener from my pocket. Church key, a friend once called it. Allowing entrance to wonders. In this darkened cattle truck, with the sounds of nature known and mysterious deepening the darkness around us, the snick of the lid flipping from the bottleneck makes me feel at home.

"We're so alone," Jacqueline says. "So forgotten."

"We've got hope, now," Jessica replies, and I wonder once again what she lost.

Jacqueline shrugs and drains her wine. "I don't know. Maybe we were clutching at straws."

"What do you mean?" Cordell asks.

"None of us know who he was. Where he came from. Where he went."

"He was here to help us."

"Was he?" Jacqueline pours more wine, stands and stares from the slits in the side of the truck again. "Still nothing out there."

The dark sings with nighttime things, proving Jacqueline wrong.

 

We take turns, four of us sleeping while the fifth holds the shotgun and keeps a watch, and a listen. I don't think I am sleeping well, but when Cordell wakes me with a harsh nudge, it takes a few seconds for things to arrange themselves in my head. Nobody to remember me, I think, and then I see the look on Cordell's face.

"Jacqueline's dead," he says. "I was keeping watch, and she was sleeping so deeply I decided to take her watch too, and—"

"Hush it!" the Irishman says. "Even if you hadn't fallen asleep, you wouldn't have saved her."

"How can you know that?"

I'm confused. Dead?

Jessica stands from the body in the corner. "She died in her sleep, Cordell. I don't know why . . . maybe her heart just stopped. But look at her." She steps back, inviting us all to look at the body.

"Is that really Jacqueline?" I ask. It's a stupid thing to say, but no one comments. Maybe for a moment they all think the same thing.

"She looks so peaceful," the Irishman says.

"She doesn't look like herself," I say. "So calm."

"Maybe that's how she was before the plagues," Cordell whispers. "And now she's back to how she should be."

We all stand quietly for a while, looking at the huddled form of Jacqueline in the corner of the cattle truck, trying to accept what has happened. In a world where billions have died, this one extra death is so difficult to understand.

"I'll check," Jessica says, her voice fragile as glass, and we all know what she means. She's going to strip Jacqueline and search for signs of disease. What good it will do . . . If she has died from one of the rampant plagues that brought on the end, there's nothing any of us can do about it. We have no idea how we survived; we have no idea why Jacqueline died.

"Maybe she just gave in," I say as I jump from the truck. Cordell follows, standing quietly by my side. I nudge his arm. "Hey. She just gave in."

"You can't know that," he says. "I took her turn at watch. If I'd woken her like I was supposed to—"

"Then she'd have died tomorrow instead of tonight."

He stares at me, and for a moment I see something troubling in his eyes. Anger? Hatred? I'm not sure, but I don't like it. "At least it would have been one more day," he says quietly. "I need a piss." He walks into the ditch beside the motorway and faces away from me, into the field.

The Irishman climbs from the truck, holding his back and groaning as he stretches. He looks at the sky and lights a cigarette. "Gonna be a nice day," he says.

"Really."

"Hey." He touches my face, a shockingly familiar gesture that brings a lump to my throat. "She's no better or worse off than us, you know? It's all borrowed time now."

"We'll remember her," I say.

He frowns, nods. "'Course we will. And when we get to Bar None, we'll raise a few for Jacqueline."

Cordell finishes urinating and climbs the fence into the neighbouring field. There will be no crops this year, but the field is alive with grasses and plants of many varieties. I can hear the hush of stalks against his jeans. A few butterflies rise and flutter away from him, and a cloud of flies forms around his head. He waves at them absently, and I can hear him sobbing.

"He blames himself," I say.

"Nah." Sometimes the Irishman tells me, with a smile bordering on hysteria, that cigarettes are bad for his health. This one he inhales deeply, closing his eyes and letting the smoke drift from his mouth as if testing the breeze.

"You think not?"

The Irishman shakes his head. "Just that there's one less of us now."

I go to say more, but then Jessica jumps from the rear of the cattle truck. She lands awkwardly. She's crying, and that comes as a shock.

"I don't know how she died," she says.

"Just gave up," the Irishman says, and he steps carefully into the ditch and up the other side. He enters the field and walks slowly after Cordell, cigarette smoke hanging in the air to mark his route.

Jessica comes to me and I see her need, lifting my arm and letting her hang onto me for a while. I suspect I'm hanging onto her as well. Her tears are sharp and dry, bitter, and she soon brings herself under control. I don't know what to say.

"Lost someone," she says at last. I'm surprised, thinking that she's opening up, spilling her contained grief.

"Who?"

"Jacqueline. I lost her. No one else, and I feel so selfish crying over that. You—everyone—you've all lost so much more."

I think of Ashley, but I try not to make this about me.

Jessica rubs at her face, smearing an errant tear across her cheek. "It's hard," she says. "Poor Jacqueline." She sighs and moves away from me, creating her own space again. Already she seems back to her normal self.

"We should bury her," I say. For some reason, I think an important moment has passed us by, untouched and unnoticed.

"In the ditch." Jessica points down at the trickle of water standing in the drainage channel.

"The ditch?"

"It's a better burial than most. And it'll be easier to dig. We don't have the right tools."

I begin digging the grave in the side of the ditch. There's a garden hoe in one of the Range rovers, and in the driver's cab of the cattle truck we find an old leather bag containing rusted builder's tools; a trowel, a plane, a hammer. I loosen the soil with the hoe to begin with, them scoop it up and out with the trowel. It's wet but not soaked, and though the muck is heavy, it means that the hole's sides don't collapse.

I work up a sweat and it feels good. For a while I forget why I'm digging this hole. Every now and then the reason smashes back at me, and I remember Jacqueline whispering in the dark corners of the mansion while the rest of us debated, argued and laughed. She never really did any of that. She offered opinions, sometimes, but they were usually disguised as fears. That's the way she'd been living her life, day by day since the end: afraid.

But when I can forget the reason for the hole, I enjoy the physical exercise. After half an hour the Irishman and Cordell return, and Cordell insists on taking his turn. I'm happy to hand over the hoe and trowel. We all stay close as he digs. I don't know what the Irishman has said to him, but there's something dark gone from his face. He doesn't smile—I don't think I ever see him smile again—but he no longer looks alone.

Jessica takes a turn, and then the Irishman jumps into the rough hole and hacks at the ground with the hoe. He pulls out several great chunks of concrete left over from the road construction, and then climbs out.

"Deep enough," Cordell says. "I'll get her." He climbs into the back of the truck and the three of us wait there awkwardly, listening to the truck's suspension creaking, not looking at each other. He appears at the gate with Jacqueline held in both arms. Suddenly, she looks dead. In the truck she may have been enjoying a peaceful asleep, but now her head's hanging back, her long hair trailing on the ground, and her arms sway with every slight movement.

I go to help but Cordell shakes his head. He steps carefully down the side of the wide ditch, reaches the hole and lowers Jacqueline in. Her feet touch first and he nearly drops her, but he manages to catch her by the arms and lower her down. He brushes a few errant strands of hair from her face, lays her arms alongside her body, and climbs from the hole.

The four of us stand there, looking down at our dead friend and wondering what to say. She's already moved on from this world, and to me the dark sides of the hole look like the beginning of another.

"Did anyone know a song she liked?" Cordell asks.

No one speaks.

"A poem? A book?"

More silence. And after a while, Cordell asks the question that makes us realise just how little we knew Jacqueline. "Does anyone know what religion she is?"

So we stand there for a while saying nothing, because none of us can think of anything to say. I'm glad nobody offers up a prayer. It's been a long time since I've spoken to God, and I can't see that He'd have any place here right now.

My stomach rumbles. The Irishman glances at me, eyes glittering.

"We should head off," Cordell says. "Long way to go."

It only takes us a few minutes to cover Jacqueline with the wet soil. We leave her face until last, as if hoping it was all a mistake and she will splutter herself awake. But her eyes remain closed, even as earth patters down on them, and we hide her pale skin from whatever the world has become.

 

We decide to continue with both Range Rovers and the bike. The bike is my idea; I love riding it, having time to think my own thoughts without feeling responsible for someone else. Cordell drives one vehicle, saying he'd prefer to be alone. Jessica drives the other with the Irishman for company.

"We make good time, we may even get there today," Jessica says.

"Hope so." I'm pulling on the heavy jacket. It's already warm, but I've come off the bike twice so far. Third time, maybe I won't be so lucky. I'll take a bit of sweat and discomfort in exchange for some decent padding. If only we had a helmet.

"Think we should mark it?" the Irishman says. He's looking back at Jacqueline's grave.

"No," Cordell says. "Let's leave her alone."

"It's quiet," I say, and for the first time I really notice just how quiet it's become. No birds singing in the trees, no animals calling from across the fields. Not even a breeze to carry our voices away.

"They see and hear us now," the Irishman says.

We break the silence with our engines and go on our way.

 

The road is surprisingly clear. We pass many cars, lorries, vans, buses, crashed motorcycles, and even a couple of tractors, but it's rare we have to stop and push vehicles out of the way. There are frequent pile-ups, and occasionally the twisted wreckage is burnt black, road melted and reset around the chaos. At one point we pass an accident on the other carriageway involving at least a hundred vehicles, swathes of them distorted and charred by terrible fires. The central barrier is bent and buckled with the weight of the calamity, but it succeeded in letting nothing through. It must have been awful. I cruise by slowly, and as we round a slow bend and head up a hillside I can see how far back the waiting traffic is piled. It's nose to bumper, side to side, all three lanes of the motorway and the hard shoulder jammed with vehicles. I can see the noses and tails of cars and trucks protruding from the ditch on the far side, and I wonder how many of them had been forced off the road.

There are bodies, of course. Hundreds of them, thousands. I don't see many, because all the car windows are up and most of them are slick with moss and rot. I pass by so much tragedy and try to imagine none of it, though I'm not totally successful. I see one car with a burst suitcase strapped to its roof, clothes and fluffy toys leaking out, and I cannot help but imagine the scene inside as the parents and children died.

It's horrible. Unbearable. I begin to cry, but it's anger I feel most of all. If only I had something or someone at whom to direct that anger. A reason, a cause, an explanation for all of this. But life is a mystery now more than ever before. Death can never offer an easy answer.

We travel for three hours before stopping for food and a drink. Jessica passes around some water, but then the Irishman opens a bottle of wine and we all gratefully accept a plastic cup. It's white and warm and I crave a beer, but it still tastes good.

The sun is bright and hot today, sky devoid of clouds. We sit behind the Range Rovers beside the road, and if I look directly out across the fields I cannot see any wrecked cars. It's almost as if nothing has happened. The countryside is wilder than usual, and the fields no longer have their regimented look, but if I close my eyes I can almost believe we're back in normal times.

If only I could hear an aircraft passing overhead, or the baying of cows, or the slow drone of para-gliders taking off from the neighbouring hills.

At some point I drift into sleep, and I begin to remember for real.

 

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Framed