Chapter Four, ‘Details’
Where’s Emily? By the time I reach the street again, I’ve half-forgotten that we were going to meet—but then I get up to the T-junction and there she is, knelt over a body by the pharmacy.
“Emily!” I shriek, and it’s with that and the wind at my heels that she looks up to see me.
There’s something wrong about her face. I’ve never seen her like this: her beautiful brown eyes are dull—yellow, almost. “We should have gone already.”
She says it very simply, and I wonder what sort of time she’s had since I last saw her. I think of telling her about the post office incident, but I don’t think she’s much in the mood to hear it. I offer her my hand. “Well, let’s get this guy off the street, anyhow.”
“No point,” she interrupts me.
Alright, I think, so he’s dead. So what?
I’m about to console her, say a few words about him like a final prayer, make a case for at least finding some kind of shelter for the body. “Let’s hide, at least. I’ve got a couple of bits we can use if they get too close. I think we’ll be pretty safe if we can find a good–”
But Emily isn’t listening. Well, she is, just not to me: she’s focused in on a sound that I can’t hear, turns her head in that direction, stands up and turns away from me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been caught up in my own intentions, but I suddenly remember that this is her town.
She was never shut out: it always belonged to her. And now she’s seeing it falter before her eyes, something I always—with horror, I recollect it—dreamed about. “Come on,” I say, and I hope my voice doesn’t betray my guilt. “I’ll take care of you. We just need to get to the park.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Emily shoves my hand off her shoulder. “They’ve taken that, too. Look.”
She points to the end of the street. We’ve got a war memorial down there, at the entrance to the park: it’s the typical kind of structure that you find in every town, a few iron-black soldiers from the First World War. They’re cramped, kneeling, twisted into shape, mid-battle; they all look like they know what they’re fighting for. Above them, there’s a similar angel of iron with her wings piqued and her hands outstretched to anyone who stands beneath her. I’ll be honest, I never really looked closely at her face before today, but it doesn’t matter anyway—from here, it catches my eye. They’ve covered her with a clean flag, and it hangs from her head like a shroud.
***
The streets are busy now. I’d like to pretend that I did some cool things once they really started to arrive, but the truth is that after we left that guy by the pharmacy, I was just trying to get us both away.
I hauled the two of us into one of the small lanes leading from the high street, and tried to get a hold of the situation. “I’ve got these,” I say, and press my spanner—the best weapon out of the two—into Emily’s hand.
She refuses to take it.
I admit, I get a little bit angry. It’s not like we’ve got much of a choice. “For God’s sake,” I start. “Get it together. You can’t switch off now, we’ve got to get moving.”
Emily winces at my delivery—I succeed in closing her palm over the weapon and she looks down at it like she’s questioning what on earth I’ve put there. “It’s heavy,” she says; it’s the only thing she does say.
“You won’t have to use it,” I lie. “But just in case…”
She flips it over in her hand, assessing the balance as if it’s only a light tennis racket, and then places it back on the doorstep beside her.
I try other things, then, too, all the usual stuff, the kissing, the soft, low voice that she typically likes, but none of it is working, and I’m quickly back to tearing my hair out over how unresponsive she’s become. I can’t help fearing that she’s going to endanger us somehow. We won’t have long before someone discovers this alleyway, and I’d rather be out of here by then. But she sits on one of the doorsteps, almost catatonic, and she doesn’t meet my eyes. “Emily,” I try. “Could you just—are you going to be alright?”
“We’re going to die.”
“No, we’re not.”
“They killed that bus driver.”
“What bus driver?”
Eventually she tells me some of the things she’s seen, while I was off on my own little jaunt around the shops. I told you she was faster than me—she’d already made it round to the end of the high street (to her own bad luck), then towards the park, and a little further.
They stopped a bus near the park, apparently, and forced everybody out onto the road. Then came the other details of exactly what happened to those passengers, and she tells me them rhythmically, as if it’s only her job to relay the exact information and nothing more, and she presses on the detail until I’m stifled by what she smelt, frozen by what she heard and saw, with those same brown eyes that clocked me in that room this morning, ignorant of all else that was coming; until I feel the lifeless damp underneath my own fingers, until it’s too much and against my own instincts (I told you I was a coward), I have to tell her to stop. I can’t take this anymore. I don’t want to hear it, and what’s worse is that she’s telling me all this when I have no way of stopping it—that it’s already happened, and she’s just fucking paralysed me instead of keeping it to herself. I hate her for telling me. I hate myself for hating her at all. I want to scream at her, swat her away, tell her to shut up.
“Come on,” I say, and I’m sure it shows in my face, but I stick out my hand: we’re still too close to the street, and the sound is coming up our alleyway.
Emily crumples further into the doorway. “Just another few minutes.”
Shit, they’re going to kill us. I take a closer look at her—she’s pale, sick, sweating; she won’t move when I try to drag her up.
I don’t know what to do. “For God’s sake!” I say again; I want to shake her with fury. “Get up, get up! They’re going to fucking find us if we don’t move now—”
“It’s fine,” she interrupts me, pushes me away. “You go.”
“I’m not fucking going without you.”
Again, she refuses to take my hand. “No. I’ll stay here.”
“We need to run,” I say. I’m genuinely considering hauling her over my shoulder, but I know I never could—and she would certainly never let me.
“I’m too tired to run.”
“I don’t give a shit, get up!”
It goes on like that for a while. I do go without her, in the end: it’s not pretty, and I’m cursing more than I’ve ever done before, but I go through with it and leave her right there on the doorstep. I consider kissing her on the head, just as a final goodbye, but I don’t—all I do is shove one of my weapons back into her unwilling hands and storm out of the alleyway to do it all on my own.
***