These Days - Part 3
(The third installment is here. Hope you like it!)
When Vince woke up the next morning, Howard was gone.
Vince shouldn’t really have been surprised. He ran a hand through his hair as he looked down at the empty sofa, small creases in the fabric forming the ghostly outline of the stranger, as if he had simply become invisible in the night. He wondered idly if Howard had taken his rucksack and made a run for it. If he had, he could have been gone for hours. It would be a shock to him when he opened the bag up and found, not food, but the silly clothes that Vince had collected like they were his last earthly delights.
He meandered downstairs, rubbing his dry hands together. His bag was still in the dark corner where he had left it last; hadn’t been spirited away into the cold streets. He unzipped it and went through his stuff: the torch and the penknife and the faint cloth all were still intact, much to his relief.
He went back up to the bathroom and splashed a bit of cold water on his face and under his arms. He’d hung his damp jeans and jumper outside the window, where they were limply dangling in the still air. He zipped the white coat up to the neck and sat down on the closed toilet lid, wondering where to go next. Maybe he could spend a few weeks in Stratford: try his hand at the old Westfield’s shopping centre to see if there was anything left that hadn’t been looted. Or walk along the abandoned railway tracks to the Islington Angel, traverse the empty supermarkets and take some books from Waterstones: make a bonfire with the only things people hadn’t wanted in the face of extinction.
He was better off by himself, he knew that, but the desertion still smarted a little bit. He had no need for a skittish Northerner with trust issues, but still. Would it really have hurt to have stuck together for a few more days?
His back ached from a night spent on the floor of the sitting room, shrouded in his sleeping bag. He dusted down the spotted jeans that were just a little too big for his thin legs, and grabbed his rucksack from downstairs again. There was no need to rush, he knew, but it would be better to get as many miles in as he could before the day was done.
When a tap sounded at the glass door he nearly leapt out of his skin and spun around, his heart pounding. Howard was peering in at him, his face contorted a little by the shattered glass, his eyes anxious. He pushed the door open with a tentative movement.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
“Christ, Howard, you nearly gave me a panic attack!”
“You’re not going, are you?” the Northerner persisted.
Vince nodded, gulping down air. “Yeah. I thought you’d gone off by yourself.”
Howard nudged the door open with his shoulder, reaching out his arm and pulling something behind him that was obscured by his bulky frame. “I went to get this,” he muttered, dragging the object through the doorway and then out before him with a triumphant grunt.
Vince felt his mouth fall open. Howard grinned proudly. “What do you think?” he said.
“Oh, my word.”
It was a supermarket trolley, old and battered with the Sainsbury’s logo still emblazoned in faded orange across the handle. Inside its wire frame were stacked row upon row of canned goods. Vince couldn’t read the labels but he could just make out the pictures from where he was stood: tomatoes, baked beans, soup, corned beef, two gallons of water in plastic jerry cans, chilli, sweetcorn, spaghetti sauce, tinned fruit, all piled up in neat little columns, colour coordinated and so bright it hurt his eyes just to look at it.
“Where did you get all this?”
Howard stuck his chin out a little at that. “I brought it with me from Leeds,” he said. “Pushed it all the way down the motorway, yes sir.” He smiled at Vince’s stunned silence and his back visibly straightened. “I slept in that bus on the road the night before last. Stashed this stuff on the bottom deck. I thought if I needed to buy my way into a camp I would be able to use it, but…”
Vince took a step forward and picked up a can of pineapple. “How?”
“My neighbour.” Howard shuffled his feet a little bit. “He converted his cellar into a sort of bunker. Said it was just in case.”
“You’re a genius, Howard.” Vince felt a grin seize his face. “You’re an absolute proper genius.”
“Well, I don’t want to blow my own trumpet…”
Vince turned over the can in his hands, becoming more acutely aware of the gnawing pang in his stomach, in his bones; the constant ache he had learnt to ignore. The stale crackers seemed so long ago.
Howard chuckled quietly and pulled a tin opener from his pocket, brandishing it as if he were a hero of old yore. “What do you want to start with?”
***
They sat on the floor in the sitting room of the decrepit old flat, cross-legged like children in primary school, spooning cold baked beans into their mouths with cutlery from the cabinet. Neither of them had felt brave enough to attempt lighting the gas stove, and both were still huddled in their coats to keep out the cold, but even so it felt right, somehow.
“You shouldn’t eat any more,” Howard warned as Vince reached up to grab a tin of pears from the trolley. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
“Oh, piss off, small-eyes,” said Vince, grappling with the tin opener in his cold and stiff hands. “I’ll do what I like. What’re you going to do about it?”
Howard smiled, his eyes sparkling like shards of glass. “Fair point well made, sir,” he said, and took down a can for himself. “But we should try and save it a bit. I don’t know how long it’ll last us. Maybe a month.”
“There’s plenty of stuff round here if you know where to look.” A drip of juice ran down Vince’s finger and he licked it off, eyes widening at the sweetness. “We’ll be alright.”
“I, um…” Howard coughed. “I was thinking I’d stay here for a couple of days. Just, you know, get my bearings. Then I’ll go over the river and see what’s going on.”
Vince smiled through a mouthful of sticky pear. “Cool!” he nodded.
“Have you really never been over there?”
“Nah.” Vince wiped a trickle of juice from his chin. “Couldn’t be anywhere other than here, I reckon. I mean, why’d you want to go to Saaf Landan anyway?”
Howard smiled amusedly. “You sound like you’re from South London.” He paused, chewing thoughtfully on a pineapple chunk. “Where do you come from?”
Vince shrugged, strands of blonde hair flickering around his face like candlelit moths. “I was raised in a jungle,” he said. “By Bryan Ferry. You?”
He lifted his head defiantly and met Howard’s gaze. For a brief moment Howard frowned, and then the dust behind his eyes cleared and he nodded.
“Fair enough. I mean, I’m from Spain,” he said.
Vince shook his head and smiled. “Nick off, you’re from Leeds; you said so!”
“I’m deeply Spanish.”
“You’re a Northern nutjob.”
Howard smiled and tipped the can against his mouth, drinking back the rest of the juice carefully so as not to slice his lip on the hard metal.
Vince licked each of his fingers one by one, enjoying the sugar under his tongue. “I can’t believe your neighbour let you take these. Did you have to kill him in his sleep or something?”
Howard looked down at his hands and the empty tin between them. Vince paused, suddenly acutely aware of the old pistol that was still presumably tucked into Howard’s coat. The air in the room suddenly grew thick.
“You didn’t…?”
Howard’s head snapped up. “What? No. No! Of course I didn’t kill him, are you out of your mind?”
Vince breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God!”
“Why d’you think I killed him? Jesus Christ!”
“Well I don’t know, you went all silent just then: I thought you might want to peel my skin all off in my sleep.”
“You absolute prat. How could you think that?” Howard tossed the can away and it made a delirious rattling noise as it travelled over the bare wooden floor. “He died, alright? He was an old guy, blind, lived next door, used to lend me jazz records. When people started getting out of the city, I couldn’t just leave him. So I stayed with him, looked after him. He gave me the keys to the cellar before he passed away.” There was dirt under Howard’s fingernails. “He wanted me to take what he had.”
Vince ran a hand through his hair and blew out his cheeks. “M’sorry, Howard.”
Howard’s knees were up against his chin. “You weren’t to know.”
There was a long, excruciating silence. Vince was beginning to consider how well he could improvise an exit when Howard hauled himself upright, slowly, as if all his weight was in his feet, and said, “Did you say there was running water here?”
“Yeah. Bathroom’s on the left.”
Howard nodded curtly and stalked off. The door closed and Vince could hear the sound of the taps being wrenched on and water dribbling into the bathtub. He swore under his breath and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Well done, you bumbaclaart,” he muttered to himself.
He wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of the food - he’d bruised his legs lugging the trolley up the stairs and he didn’t feel much like dragging it back down on his own, but at the same time there was a persistent doubt in the back of his mind that kept telling him to hide the supplies, nonsense as it was. He went through the empty kitchen cabinets and chucked the jars of mouldy jam in the bin, then stacked the tins haphazardly on the dusty shelves. He wiped his dirt-streaked hands on a tea towel and then went back into the living room to gather his sleeping bag from off the floor.
When the door to the bathroom clicked open he flinched, still unaccustomed to sudden noises; his heart skittering as Howard slowly emerged, dragging his feet.
“Alright?” Vince nervously ran a hand through his hair. “You look good.”
“Glad I meet with your approval,” Howard grunted. He was bundled up in several layers of what looked like Hawaiian shirts, and a pair of cords that only served to make him look larger than he already was. He’d cut his hair messily, and Vince was surprised to see that under all the grime it was actually quite fine; a dark mocha colour. The beard was gone, too, leaving behind only a well-trimmed sliver of hair over his upper lip.
Vince dabbed at his own mouth with a finger. “You missed a bit.”
Howard frowned. “How dare you, sir? This is my look. I’m bringing the moustache back.”
Vince tried not to laugh in case that aggravated Howard further. “Bringing it back to who, exactly? I don’t know if you’ve noticed but currently it’s just me and there’s no way I’m growing one of those.”
Howard paused, and then his eyes creased a little bit at the corner, folding in like wet paper, and his shoulders began to tremble. Vince let himself laugh as well, then. The sound of it was rasping and tremulous.
***
“It just feels odd, you know? Like…going through people’s leftovers.”
“Mm,” Vince hummed. “You reckon there’s a stool? I wanna see if there’s anything on that top shelf.”
“Top shelf?” Howard stood on his toes and craned his neck to peer over. “Nope. Nothing there.” He paused. “Do you know what I mean, though? It’s all these people’s lives.” He ran his hand over the cracked wood of the storage shelves. “I mean, people worked here and now we’re just going through taking away all these bits and pieces. We’re like bin men.”
“S’only Tescos, Howard,” Vince sighed. He wandered over to the deep freezers, but they were broken and leaking, and anything that had once been food was now completely unrecognisable. “That stuff you’ve got’s genius, but it’s not going to last long, is it? We haven’t got much choice.”
The stockrooms had been empty, too. Anything of value had been taken by the rioters and the looters, back in the early days; the rest of it was useless. He’d learned to resign himself to disappointment. Sometimes you would find something beautiful cowering in the rubble. Most of the time there was nothing there. Flip of a coin.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s try somewhere else.”
The automatic doors had stuck a long time ago, leaving only a small gap to squeeze through. Outside, the sky was almost white and the sun drowsy. Vince nudged at some shards of fallen debris with the toe of his boot.
Then he heard a rustle a short way off in the distance, and turned to look. Near Dalston Junction, where the shiny new block of flats was now just bare metal bones and fractured glass, a deer was quietly chewing on a patch of overgrown weeds. It was the one from the day before, with the same matted fur and thin body; a lucky survivor from the park that had once had a deer enclosure.
Vince felt a clumsy hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t move,” Howard breathed in his ear. “I’m going to get it.” He fumbled around in his coat pocket. Vince remembered the loaded pistol.
“Oi!” He clapped his hands, the sudden sound thudding loudly in the silent street. The deer glanced at them, and then shot off in the opposite direction, skidding over the pavement with graceless movements.
Vince turned back to look at Howard. His eyes were dark, the veins in his neck taut.
“Why did you do that?”
“Howard-”
“Why did you…” Howard closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That was food, Vince.”
“Listen to me, things are different out here.” Vince grabbed hold of Howard’s jacket, brushing off the muffled, “Don’t touch me,” he got in return. “It’s not like how it was. That deer’s trying to survive, just like we are. You can’t kill it, Howard, you can’t.”
Howard sighed, and his shoulders shuddered like they could topple buildings. His lips pressed together tightly. “You’re a funny little man, aren’t you?”
“Little man?” Vince grinned. “Hey, that’s not bad. You and me, the big man and the little man, we’re like kids’ TV characters!”
Howard shook his head, but there was a crooked smile about his mouth.
“Alright then, little man,” he said. “Where to now?”
Next chapter here.
When Vince woke up the next morning, Howard was gone.
Vince shouldn’t really have been surprised. He ran a hand through his hair as he looked down at the empty sofa, small creases in the fabric forming the ghostly outline of the stranger, as if he had simply become invisible in the night. He wondered idly if Howard had taken his rucksack and made a run for it. If he had, he could have been gone for hours. It would be a shock to him when he opened the bag up and found, not food, but the silly clothes that Vince had collected like they were his last earthly delights.
He meandered downstairs, rubbing his dry hands together. His bag was still in the dark corner where he had left it last; hadn’t been spirited away into the cold streets. He unzipped it and went through his stuff: the torch and the penknife and the faint cloth all were still intact, much to his relief.
He went back up to the bathroom and splashed a bit of cold water on his face and under his arms. He’d hung his damp jeans and jumper outside the window, where they were limply dangling in the still air. He zipped the white coat up to the neck and sat down on the closed toilet lid, wondering where to go next. Maybe he could spend a few weeks in Stratford: try his hand at the old Westfield’s shopping centre to see if there was anything left that hadn’t been looted. Or walk along the abandoned railway tracks to the Islington Angel, traverse the empty supermarkets and take some books from Waterstones: make a bonfire with the only things people hadn’t wanted in the face of extinction.
He was better off by himself, he knew that, but the desertion still smarted a little bit. He had no need for a skittish Northerner with trust issues, but still. Would it really have hurt to have stuck together for a few more days?
His back ached from a night spent on the floor of the sitting room, shrouded in his sleeping bag. He dusted down the spotted jeans that were just a little too big for his thin legs, and grabbed his rucksack from downstairs again. There was no need to rush, he knew, but it would be better to get as many miles in as he could before the day was done.
When a tap sounded at the glass door he nearly leapt out of his skin and spun around, his heart pounding. Howard was peering in at him, his face contorted a little by the shattered glass, his eyes anxious. He pushed the door open with a tentative movement.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
“Christ, Howard, you nearly gave me a panic attack!”
“You’re not going, are you?” the Northerner persisted.
Vince nodded, gulping down air. “Yeah. I thought you’d gone off by yourself.”
Howard nudged the door open with his shoulder, reaching out his arm and pulling something behind him that was obscured by his bulky frame. “I went to get this,” he muttered, dragging the object through the doorway and then out before him with a triumphant grunt.
Vince felt his mouth fall open. Howard grinned proudly. “What do you think?” he said.
“Oh, my word.”
It was a supermarket trolley, old and battered with the Sainsbury’s logo still emblazoned in faded orange across the handle. Inside its wire frame were stacked row upon row of canned goods. Vince couldn’t read the labels but he could just make out the pictures from where he was stood: tomatoes, baked beans, soup, corned beef, two gallons of water in plastic jerry cans, chilli, sweetcorn, spaghetti sauce, tinned fruit, all piled up in neat little columns, colour coordinated and so bright it hurt his eyes just to look at it.
“Where did you get all this?”
Howard stuck his chin out a little at that. “I brought it with me from Leeds,” he said. “Pushed it all the way down the motorway, yes sir.” He smiled at Vince’s stunned silence and his back visibly straightened. “I slept in that bus on the road the night before last. Stashed this stuff on the bottom deck. I thought if I needed to buy my way into a camp I would be able to use it, but…”
Vince took a step forward and picked up a can of pineapple. “How?”
“My neighbour.” Howard shuffled his feet a little bit. “He converted his cellar into a sort of bunker. Said it was just in case.”
“You’re a genius, Howard.” Vince felt a grin seize his face. “You’re an absolute proper genius.”
“Well, I don’t want to blow my own trumpet…”
Vince turned over the can in his hands, becoming more acutely aware of the gnawing pang in his stomach, in his bones; the constant ache he had learnt to ignore. The stale crackers seemed so long ago.
Howard chuckled quietly and pulled a tin opener from his pocket, brandishing it as if he were a hero of old yore. “What do you want to start with?”
***
They sat on the floor in the sitting room of the decrepit old flat, cross-legged like children in primary school, spooning cold baked beans into their mouths with cutlery from the cabinet. Neither of them had felt brave enough to attempt lighting the gas stove, and both were still huddled in their coats to keep out the cold, but even so it felt right, somehow.
“You shouldn’t eat any more,” Howard warned as Vince reached up to grab a tin of pears from the trolley. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
“Oh, piss off, small-eyes,” said Vince, grappling with the tin opener in his cold and stiff hands. “I’ll do what I like. What’re you going to do about it?”
Howard smiled, his eyes sparkling like shards of glass. “Fair point well made, sir,” he said, and took down a can for himself. “But we should try and save it a bit. I don’t know how long it’ll last us. Maybe a month.”
“There’s plenty of stuff round here if you know where to look.” A drip of juice ran down Vince’s finger and he licked it off, eyes widening at the sweetness. “We’ll be alright.”
“I, um…” Howard coughed. “I was thinking I’d stay here for a couple of days. Just, you know, get my bearings. Then I’ll go over the river and see what’s going on.”
Vince smiled through a mouthful of sticky pear. “Cool!” he nodded.
“Have you really never been over there?”
“Nah.” Vince wiped a trickle of juice from his chin. “Couldn’t be anywhere other than here, I reckon. I mean, why’d you want to go to Saaf Landan anyway?”
Howard smiled amusedly. “You sound like you’re from South London.” He paused, chewing thoughtfully on a pineapple chunk. “Where do you come from?”
Vince shrugged, strands of blonde hair flickering around his face like candlelit moths. “I was raised in a jungle,” he said. “By Bryan Ferry. You?”
He lifted his head defiantly and met Howard’s gaze. For a brief moment Howard frowned, and then the dust behind his eyes cleared and he nodded.
“Fair enough. I mean, I’m from Spain,” he said.
Vince shook his head and smiled. “Nick off, you’re from Leeds; you said so!”
“I’m deeply Spanish.”
“You’re a Northern nutjob.”
Howard smiled and tipped the can against his mouth, drinking back the rest of the juice carefully so as not to slice his lip on the hard metal.
Vince licked each of his fingers one by one, enjoying the sugar under his tongue. “I can’t believe your neighbour let you take these. Did you have to kill him in his sleep or something?”
Howard looked down at his hands and the empty tin between them. Vince paused, suddenly acutely aware of the old pistol that was still presumably tucked into Howard’s coat. The air in the room suddenly grew thick.
“You didn’t…?”
Howard’s head snapped up. “What? No. No! Of course I didn’t kill him, are you out of your mind?”
Vince breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God!”
“Why d’you think I killed him? Jesus Christ!”
“Well I don’t know, you went all silent just then: I thought you might want to peel my skin all off in my sleep.”
“You absolute prat. How could you think that?” Howard tossed the can away and it made a delirious rattling noise as it travelled over the bare wooden floor. “He died, alright? He was an old guy, blind, lived next door, used to lend me jazz records. When people started getting out of the city, I couldn’t just leave him. So I stayed with him, looked after him. He gave me the keys to the cellar before he passed away.” There was dirt under Howard’s fingernails. “He wanted me to take what he had.”
Vince ran a hand through his hair and blew out his cheeks. “M’sorry, Howard.”
Howard’s knees were up against his chin. “You weren’t to know.”
There was a long, excruciating silence. Vince was beginning to consider how well he could improvise an exit when Howard hauled himself upright, slowly, as if all his weight was in his feet, and said, “Did you say there was running water here?”
“Yeah. Bathroom’s on the left.”
Howard nodded curtly and stalked off. The door closed and Vince could hear the sound of the taps being wrenched on and water dribbling into the bathtub. He swore under his breath and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Well done, you bumbaclaart,” he muttered to himself.
He wasn’t sure what to do with the rest of the food - he’d bruised his legs lugging the trolley up the stairs and he didn’t feel much like dragging it back down on his own, but at the same time there was a persistent doubt in the back of his mind that kept telling him to hide the supplies, nonsense as it was. He went through the empty kitchen cabinets and chucked the jars of mouldy jam in the bin, then stacked the tins haphazardly on the dusty shelves. He wiped his dirt-streaked hands on a tea towel and then went back into the living room to gather his sleeping bag from off the floor.
When the door to the bathroom clicked open he flinched, still unaccustomed to sudden noises; his heart skittering as Howard slowly emerged, dragging his feet.
“Alright?” Vince nervously ran a hand through his hair. “You look good.”
“Glad I meet with your approval,” Howard grunted. He was bundled up in several layers of what looked like Hawaiian shirts, and a pair of cords that only served to make him look larger than he already was. He’d cut his hair messily, and Vince was surprised to see that under all the grime it was actually quite fine; a dark mocha colour. The beard was gone, too, leaving behind only a well-trimmed sliver of hair over his upper lip.
Vince dabbed at his own mouth with a finger. “You missed a bit.”
Howard frowned. “How dare you, sir? This is my look. I’m bringing the moustache back.”
Vince tried not to laugh in case that aggravated Howard further. “Bringing it back to who, exactly? I don’t know if you’ve noticed but currently it’s just me and there’s no way I’m growing one of those.”
Howard paused, and then his eyes creased a little bit at the corner, folding in like wet paper, and his shoulders began to tremble. Vince let himself laugh as well, then. The sound of it was rasping and tremulous.
***
“It just feels odd, you know? Like…going through people’s leftovers.”
“Mm,” Vince hummed. “You reckon there’s a stool? I wanna see if there’s anything on that top shelf.”
“Top shelf?” Howard stood on his toes and craned his neck to peer over. “Nope. Nothing there.” He paused. “Do you know what I mean, though? It’s all these people’s lives.” He ran his hand over the cracked wood of the storage shelves. “I mean, people worked here and now we’re just going through taking away all these bits and pieces. We’re like bin men.”
“S’only Tescos, Howard,” Vince sighed. He wandered over to the deep freezers, but they were broken and leaking, and anything that had once been food was now completely unrecognisable. “That stuff you’ve got’s genius, but it’s not going to last long, is it? We haven’t got much choice.”
The stockrooms had been empty, too. Anything of value had been taken by the rioters and the looters, back in the early days; the rest of it was useless. He’d learned to resign himself to disappointment. Sometimes you would find something beautiful cowering in the rubble. Most of the time there was nothing there. Flip of a coin.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s try somewhere else.”
The automatic doors had stuck a long time ago, leaving only a small gap to squeeze through. Outside, the sky was almost white and the sun drowsy. Vince nudged at some shards of fallen debris with the toe of his boot.
Then he heard a rustle a short way off in the distance, and turned to look. Near Dalston Junction, where the shiny new block of flats was now just bare metal bones and fractured glass, a deer was quietly chewing on a patch of overgrown weeds. It was the one from the day before, with the same matted fur and thin body; a lucky survivor from the park that had once had a deer enclosure.
Vince felt a clumsy hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t move,” Howard breathed in his ear. “I’m going to get it.” He fumbled around in his coat pocket. Vince remembered the loaded pistol.
“Oi!” He clapped his hands, the sudden sound thudding loudly in the silent street. The deer glanced at them, and then shot off in the opposite direction, skidding over the pavement with graceless movements.
Vince turned back to look at Howard. His eyes were dark, the veins in his neck taut.
“Why did you do that?”
“Howard-”
“Why did you…” Howard closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That was food, Vince.”
“Listen to me, things are different out here.” Vince grabbed hold of Howard’s jacket, brushing off the muffled, “Don’t touch me,” he got in return. “It’s not like how it was. That deer’s trying to survive, just like we are. You can’t kill it, Howard, you can’t.”
Howard sighed, and his shoulders shuddered like they could topple buildings. His lips pressed together tightly. “You’re a funny little man, aren’t you?”
“Little man?” Vince grinned. “Hey, that’s not bad. You and me, the big man and the little man, we’re like kids’ TV characters!”
Howard shook his head, but there was a crooked smile about his mouth.
“Alright then, little man,” he said. “Where to now?”
Next chapter here.