Chapter Two, ‘If You Want A Nice Day Out, Don’t Go To The Post Office’
I should have paid attention. It’s been quiet for far, far too long.
“Wait,” I start, letting go of her hand—and that’s what clues me in: it’s that need, that feeling—I have to whisper.
Somehow we separate ourselves and I make it to the window; Emily joins me, falling silent at my shoulder, and she looks out just as fervently as I do, but it’s the same old view that greets us. I scan the road, the street, the windows: nothing’s changed. It’s still as boring as ever, and the sky’s all grey, the summer is dying, and nothing is happening.
For some reason, though, I’ve learned to trust my intuition.
Emily’s already at the door. “We should move,” she says; her eyes are all over me, summing me up in what feels like a final glance, like she’s soaking in whatever she sees in me for the last time.
I never understood why she wanted any of this from me, why she stuck with me at all. Once you get past all the other stuff, I’m just a mongrel child that no one wants, a kicked dog underneath the usual crap people usually see. I have no home, not really—she couldn’t possibly want me.
But she does, and I just have to trust that she means it when she takes my hand like this. I say something like ‘okay’, or ‘let’s get down to the street’, but I can’t really hear myself and neither can Emily: the words are thick and swollen in my throat, but she only nods and pats my hand, and I allow myself to be led down the stairs like a child.
***
When we reach street level, I know they’ve arrived. There’s something silent about the town, even though we can’t see anyone yet—people are still milling outside the post office, and one guy can be heard complaining loudly about his receipt. They’ve kept all the shops open because some of them don’t even want to believe that anyone would come here to kill.
Up towards the T-junction, there’s an old lady popping into Boots for what looks like her regular shop; someone holds a door for the man behind them, and a construction worker comes out of the local Greggs with a sausage roll already half-stuffed into his throat.
“It’s fine,” Emily nudges me, but I can hear it in her voice. She’s not convinced by this display one bit, and neither am I.
We’re quite close to the railway line, and I hear the scuttle of the train along the tracks as it leaves for the capital—they’ll be lucky, I think. They’ve got away in time.
But the two of us will stay. It’s her and me, and we’ve always been two sides of the same coin, or however you want to put it. I’m stuck in my head half the time, and she pulls me out—and I keep us out of trouble, wherever we find it. It’s worked until now.
A middle-aged couple, hand-in-hand, smiles at us as they walk in our direction; we make way for them on the pavement, one of them sticks out a hand to wave, thanks; they leave. I turn and watch them walk round the corner towards the station.
It’s very clear that no one else is scared.
I get a sharp, twisting pain in my ribcage, an impulse that tells me to tell them to run, to grab any car and just go, but I feel a hand tugging in mine as it pulls me back. “You have to leave them,” Emily shakes her head. “They knew about all this, and they’ll have to make their own way.”
“I don’t care. I want them to get out.”
“Oh, you’ll never manage that,” she laughs. “This place? I can’t imagine getting anyone to leave willingly when things really get going.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t think they know what’s going to happen.”
“Well, then,” she says, a little closer to me, “we should do something about that.”
God. I’m relieved. I can trust her with anything. You should try finding someone like that, and have them read your mind.
We decide to go into all the shops and tell people, even if they ignore us. They probably will, but we might have better luck if Emily’s the one saying it all. It’s better if we split up, because it only takes one person to say something, and then they can take it or leave it as they wish.
“I can go up to the end of the street,” I suggest, and look up towards the Boots, but my wandering voice gives me away again and Emily cuts me off before I can continue.
“No.” She’s firm, and her brown eyes, warm as the sun on my skin, don’t have to do much to get me to relent. “I’ll do it. You take the post office, and tell them all to clear out. Don’t even tell them the truth, just give them anything that’ll make them leave. Tell them there’s been a car accident or something.”
“I could make one happen,” I joke, but half-seriously. It’s a good plan: she’s faster than me, anyway. She was always the running-track kind, the type that’d stay after school or work to focus on lap after lap after lap, to run off into the hills and trees on the weekend, bounding over roots and dry soil and barrelling down beside the stream until she runs into my arms beside my dad’s car. I’m the type to sit on the bonnet and happily wait in the miserable rain. I don’t do much and I’m proud of it.
But to put her mind at ease, and maybe my own, I get myself together and draw my shoulders up, like I’m afraid of nothing and all these people need is just a bit of help to get going, sharpish. It’s like I’m a real soldier. She laughs at my wanting height, but gives me a nod of approval. “We’ll be alright.”
“I love you,” I say, and I mean it, of course. I always mean it.
She gives me that look again. “Love you.”
“Go,” I order her—it’s the only time I can, really. “I bet I can beat you to it. You take this side of the street, yeah? I’ll follow up towards the car park, and we can meet somewhere in the middle—I’ll shout for you, and we’ll find each other that way…”
As a response, a beautiful, quiet response, she kisses me. I press forward into her and grab her belt as we cling onto each other, and it feels like the real thing—we’re like those old soldiers, the ones who loved each other and said goodbye and died, knowing it was for the other—and I’ll see her again in about thirty minutes, but it’s like we could be parted forever. Emily has to pry my fingers away from her shirt and she kisses each of them as she does so, and we stand there like that for a while and I’ve got a stupid grin on my face and my voice chokes, and then I tell her to go again, and I watch her feet fly quickly against the pavement as she takes off up the street.
Fuck, I could watch her forever. Sometimes I do that, I play that little bit over and over in my head.
But I force myself to cross the street and march into the post office, and for a moment I forget the idea of a war and the thing that I can feel is coming. It’s the carpet under my feet that does it. It’s grey and black and soft, and they’ve arranged it in diagonal squares like a chess board, but I walk right across it and ignore the long queue from the door; it muffles the sounds from the street outside, but it can’t do anything about the shock of my heart against my ribcage, and I have to physically grip my left abdomen in order to get a hold of it.
I end up surprising one of the patrons by moving a little too close as I cross the floor, but it’s too late now to think much of how I’m perceived. “Um,” I say, loudly, and it’s enough to get the attention of whoever’s waiting. I count them: one, two, three… maybe ten or fifteen of us, if you include the staff. They’re barricaded behind the glass, but it won’t protect them if they want to come out of the building alive again.
It’s ridiculous to think like this when there’s no one here. Why am I like this? Why can’t they all just take this seriously, instead of leaving the clean-up to me?
I stumble under the gaze of them all—and that’s when that familiar smart of stupidity stings my eyes, the feeling that this is all uncalled for, that I’m trying to protect a place that would never lift a finger to protect me, that I’ll be the village idiot once this is all over and it turns out that nobody came; that the town really is safe.
“You need to leave.” I try my best to make it sound like I’ve got any authority, but my words sound empty and flat, and even I wouldn’t believe me if I told myself to leave. Why should any of them listen to me at all? “They’re coming,” I say, and I end up stammering over my shoes. “There’s a whole army due any minute, or something. I’m not sure. I think they said they were coming.”
“Who’s coming?” A large man stands at the counter, his hands busy with a pile of newly bought stamps; the coronation red shines out to me, and it blurs until I blink.
Am I being dramatic? Have these people forgotten we’re being attacked? Have they not read the news, or paid attention at all to what was obviously going to happen? It gives me enough venom to get the rest of the words right—and this time, I sound a lot more forceful. “Are you fucking stupid?” I begin, and for once I let my panic get the better of me and I square up to him as if he isn’t twice my size—that seems to work because there’s growing movement in the queue with every lash of emphasis. “You know we’re at war. Do you think they’re going to wait for you to post some fucking envelope? What do you think they’re going to do to us once they get here? There are kids in here, for God’s sake!”
And it’s true: I don’t care about kids myself, and especially not the two grubby children who are playing in the corner by the leaflet stand, but they should have been out of here a long time ago.
You know what—I’m ready. I draw myself up again, and this man has given me the courage I needed to lie. Blatantly. “They’ve reached the top of the high street,” I say. “They’ve got bayonets, real ones, and they’ve been killing people all the way down already. You’ve got five minutes to get out. I suggest you head south, and we’ll try to hold them off here.”
I don’t even bother trying to convince them anymore. I never could get to grips with the people here, and they seem to have some solid reason to ignore me. Well, I’ll let them.
I storm out of the post office like an idiot, and pass someone leaving the charity shop next door: it’s with some force that I order them to get out of the town and I don’t even care to look back to find out what reaction they’ve had.
But then I reach the last window of the shop, all soft lighting indoors and there’s a woman still milling around at the till, checking over her notes with dark-rimmed glasses. I keep going, then after some thought, I halt where I am, and trudge unwillingly back. I stick my head in through the door, and the welcome bell tinkles above my head. “Everybody out.”
The window dressing catches my eye as the door swings behind me, some ghastly book that you’d find on the shelves at a petrol station, and I stare back momentarily at the owlish woman at the counter. Leave, I mouth, they’re here, and make a gesture like a gun; I point it right at her, and she quickly scrambles behind the counter, grabbing something I can’t see.
That’ll have to do for now: I run through a map in my head of the town.
I managed to scare off the post office customers: I can hear them down the street, and I turn, watching them file out, each one giving the whole road a wary glance as they hop down the stairs onto the pavement. As he passes out of the building, I give that large man some sort of a wave of thanks—the bastard—but he’s not looking at me, and at last he’s the final one out: he’s made sure everyone, even the staff, have gone before him, and when they stall on the pavement as if they’re unsure of where to turn—I told them south, the idiots—he guides them towards the bridge like he’s shepherding a nervous gaggle of geese, so in my head I give him a begrudging mark for good behaviour, and I turn back towards the town.
***