As usual, the older ones ran ahead up the path, and, as usual, I had to carry Billy. Joni plagued me with questions, but there was both too much and nothing to say. Yes, there were three D-E-A-D people and more inside the pub and cars. No, I couldn’t tell how they’d . . . passed away. No, there was no B-L-O-O-D, nothing to suggest V-I-O-L-E-N-C-E. Lola started sniveling, and Joni walked with her, holding her round the shoulders in an awkward moving bear hug.
I was glad to stop talking as I lugged Billy along the earthworks to the summit. The ground tumbled away down the ramparts, which had been built with unimaginable industry eons ago, and left us in a bleak but lofty position that seemed both exposed and protected. Shropshire rolled out ahead of us; Wales lay out behind. The kids clambered over a cairn, while Joni and I tried to decipher the view with her map and compass. I looked east, toward home, but saw only hills, fields, more hills, and more fields. Some kind of castle. A road: a black river in the sunlight. Charlie dragged me over to the cairn, informed me there was an orientation plaque that told us what we could see. Now the hills had names, the fields were populated with barrows and flint factories and standing stones, and the settlements became real once I could pinpoint them on the map. Charlie prattled on about ancient forests and Stone Age tribes, and I snapped that I could read the tourist information board myself if I wanted to. He trotted off to inspect the defenses, leaping about in a jubilant display of not having hurt feelings. I picked at a scabby skin tag behind my ear, dabbing the blood onto my tongue, savoring the metallic taste of myself.
“We need to go home,” said Joni.
We could talk now that the kids were upwind, but it was so quiet; it seemed the world had been put on mute. The absence of sound felt anything but peaceful: it declared the presence of nothing.
“If the Druids or Romans marched up here today, it’d look the same as they left it.”
“I said, we need to go home. I want to get to a computer or a landline, try and call David. He’s supposed to fly back from New York today. It is Sunday, right?”
Was it still Sunday? I hadn’t had a moment to think about Julian—the frenetic tedium of feeding and refereeing the kids had forced my brain into standby—and I’d been grateful for the emotional oblivion. As happened during my business trips, I’d settled into a new persona so distinct from myself that even strangers reacted differently: hotel staff more deferential, men lingering over eye contact, women more wary. Sneaking glances at photos of the kids on my phone would ground me again, stop me from floating away. But I still had stabbing moments of clarity when I understood how people could up and leave their home, their family, their friends without a qualm. In fact, I reasoned, they probably didn’t leave—it was something more passive—they simply woke up one morning, distracted, and their old life had receded like a tide. Then later: “Oh, my husband and children? Why, yes, I simply forgot all about them. How remiss of me.”
But the top of the Bury Ditches, with the wind snapping its fingers in my face, was as sobering as seeing my own front door from the taxi. The tide rushed in, bringing with it Julian and his brother, David; I turned as though I might see their heads bob up over the ramparts. I half expected to hear Julian’s forced laughter, gabbling about some bullshit venture so that David couldn’t ruin his fun with practical questions.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a plane,” Joni was saying. “Like Saturday morning maybe? Or Friday?”
And that was it. The eerie silence had a prosaic explanation: there were no planes. Joni and I watched the sky, but there were none of the vapor trails that usually carve up our congested airspace and, so obvious now, no persistent background drone from high-altitude aircraft.
“You don’t notice until it’s gone,” I said.
“How’s David going to get home?”
We went over our timeline, trying to piece together when we last heard cars, when we last saw someone, when the dog arrived, when we spotted the cows. All the clues we had missed. I remembered that I’d deleted a couple of messages from Julian. I found his e-mails in the trash folder on my phone. Both sent late on Friday:
Call me—urgent!
Can’t get through. Pls call.
“You’re right,” I said. “We need to go home.”
But Joni was leaking into a tissue, and I looked around for Lola to come and give her a hug.
“What if it’s not just here?” Joni sniveled.
I stared at her, incredulous. If it were “just here,” the village would be crawling with emergency services. The police would answer a 999 call. There would be planes in the sky. “Of course it’s not just here, you—”
Before I could finish my point, an almighty boom surged across the landscape, ricocheting off hillsides and gathering momentum as the initial blast was joined by a further barrage of cracks and bangs. I spun round to look dead north, where flames and a column of smoke rose from some far-off industrial buildings. We gathered together on the edge of the earthworks and watched a factory explode and burn, long after the heat went out of the day, and long after the kids stopped asking questions about it.
Once upon a time, I made a rule never to start drinking before I’d finished cooking. But, “We’re on holiday, right?” I said to Joni while she rooted through the cooler, and I chugged back a warm can of gin and tonic. She looked at me sideways and said a pointed nothing, but accepted a can nonetheless. Then she put it to one side, unopened.
We decided to sleep at the camp again rather than drive back to the city at night, not knowing what we might stumble upon in the dark. Bodies seemed likely, maybe lots of bodies. Or chaos, looting, unrest. I’d been in London for a night during the riots; it didn’t take much to set people off, especially under cover of darkness. So I wanted to see what we were facing.
Peter was worried about his mum and asked if we could phone her. He wanted to climb to the top of a tree to get a signal, because all the phone towers were up high, so obviously the signal was up high, if only he could climb up: Could he, could he, could he? He could not.
Joni gathered him into a stifling embrace and told him a long story about a coyote who lost his mom in a canyon, and she got all the way to the end of the saga, some fifteen minutes of it, before Maggie piped up with, “But what’s a coyote, and what’s a canyon?” and I snorted into my third can. It was late before we got them settled and then only by putting them down top to tail in the yurt. I crammed my mattress in, too, but Horatio would have to brave the night alone in the other tent.