“Digging a fucking big hole,” he answers, no hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“I know that, but what’s it for?”
He stops working momentarily and looks over the lip of the pit, back across the field. No one’s looking at us. They’re far enough away for him to feel comfortable enough to talk.
“You won’t do yourself any favors if you keep asking questions like that, I already told you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He glances around again.
“We lost a few people over the last couple of weeks,” he finally explains. “We would have burned them like usual, but Warner’s got this idea that things here have gone too far the wrong way. He said he wants them buried like we used to. Says if someone doesn’t start making a stand, we’ll be living like savages again before we know it. We’ll end up going the way of the Brutes.”
“So what happened?”
“A few of them got sick…”
“And the others?”
“An accident,” he tells me reluctantly. “A handful of people got hurt, two were killed.”
“What kind of accident?”
I know instantly from the expression on his face that I’m pushing too hard.
“You really need to stop talking and get working. I’ve told you all I’m going to.”
10
THE SUN HAS SET by the time I’m finally allowed to stop. I’m exhausted; weak with effort and numb with cold.
The pit was finished a while back. Warner, his right-hand man Ben, and a crowd of others pulled a trailer loaded with corpses into the field. I tried to watch from a safe distance and I counted at least five bodies. They were wrapped up in blankets and black plastic, so it was impossible to tell who they were or how they’d died. I’m sure one of them must have been Casey, Hinchcliffe’s missing soldier. I even volunteered to help fill in the grave so I could get a better look. That was a mistake. A load more unnecessary effort and I couldn’t see a damn thing.
Something’s definitely not right here. Warner and several others stood silently around the edge of the pit, watching the dead being buried and muttering and whispering to each other. I can’t make up my mind whether Warner is genuinely hankering back to prewar values of respect and dignity, or whether this was a mock burial to throw people off the scent. Is all of Southwold just an elaborate facade? Were they burying evidence and trying to hide their crimes?
After they’d buried the bodies, a couple of us were sent into a copse of trees to fetch firewood, which we loaded onto the back of the trailer. Virtually everything’s dead, so it took less time than expected to gather up a large enough load. Other people arrived from the center of the village a while back to take the firewood away, and I’ve been called over into a nearby house with the rest of the group I was working with.
The house is just a shell. There are a couple of faded photographs hanging on the walls, but those are the only traces I can see of the people who used to live here. Everything else—the furniture and all their belongings—has gone. A fire has been built in the hearth, and most of the others are already sitting around in its orange glow, trying to get warm, staring silently into the flames and waiting for a dented pot of water to boil. I find myself a space on the muddy, threadbare carpet and lean back against the wall. The floor’s cold but I’m too tired to care. What heat the fire provides is negated by icy drafts sneaking in through broken windows and the gaps beneath doors. I wrap my arms around myself to try to keep warm and look around at the six other people here with me.
A large, straw-haired woman (Jill, I think, one of the work gang leaders) eventually gets up and makes hot drinks, which she hands around in chipped mugs. The wood on the fire crackles and pops as it burns. The chimney’s blocked, and the house is filling with smoke.
“There’ll be food in the square outside the hotel later,” she says. “It won’t be much, but it should help keep the cold out.”
“What about tomorrow?” the man with the tape-repaired specs and the comb-over asks, sitting opposite, leaning back against the wall.
“No work here,” she answers, “but Warner will find you something. There’s always the fields.”
“This place is well organized,” I say to her, taking advantage of a natural gap in the conversation to try to push for information again.
“You just arrived?”
“Got here this morning.”
“Then you might want to think about staying. You’ll not find anything better around here. You’ll probably not find anything better anywhere.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because John Warner’s a good man. Because the things he’s planning are going to give people like us our lives back.”
“People like us?”
“People who don’t want to keep fighting for everything,” she explains. “The war’s over, and it’s time to start picking up the pieces. Time to stop all the killing and start remembering what it’s like to be human again.”
She’s obviously never been to Lowestoft, I think to myself, trying not to smirk at the thought. I suddenly feel like I’ve wandered into a hippie commune from the sixties. Thing is, peace and love and all that bullshit never really counted for much, and as far as I can see, they count for absolutely nothing now. Remorse, compassion, regret … publicly demonstrate any of those emotions and you’re likely to get torn apart. Give someone an inch, and they’ll take ten miles. Hold your hand out to help someone, and some nasty bastard will tear your arm off and beat you to death with the bloody limb. That’s how it is in the rest of the world outside Southwold, anyway. Everyone I’ve so far seen is stuck in a rut—no one wants to go back to the lives they had before, but there are no new roles or routines for people to move into. The violence that brought us all to this point has become the norm.
“So how’s Warner planning to change things, then?” I ask, genuinely curious. “By making you bury bodies? By getting people to plow fields where nothing’s ever gonna grow?”
She shakes her head angrily. “If you don’t like it, just fuck off.”
“It’s not that,” the silver-haired pit digger I spoke to earlier says from another corner of the room. “Warner’s just trying to pick the pieces up again and restore some order. It’s not so much what we’re doing, the important thing is the fact we’re doing it at all.”
“Sorry,” I say quickly, backpedaling fast and realizing that publicly bad-mouthing Warner was a stupid move, “I didn’t mean to sound so critical. It’s just that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything like this. This is the first place I’ve been in weeks where people aren’t constantly at each other’s throats.”
“We’ve all done more than our fair share of that,” Jill says quietly, swirling the dregs of her drink around in the bottom of her mug, then knocking it back, “and chances are we’ll all have to fight again someday.”
“You don’t always have a choice,” someone else says, his face hidden by the darkness.
“There’s always a choice,” Jill says. “That’s what John’ll tell you.”
There’s an underlying tension and emotion in this woman’s voice that I didn’t expect. Am I the only one who’s picking up on it? She sounds like she genuinely supports Warner and believes in what he’s doing, whatever that might be. I guess the fact she’s here at all is proof that Warner’s chosen not to echo Hinchcliffe’s “management model.” Were she in Lowestoft, unless she was a particularly strong fighter or had a particular skill that Hinchcliffe needed, she’d most likely have been swallowed up with the rest of the underclass, not assuming any position of authority or worth. Could this place and its leader actually be for real? I’m still not convinced. How can Warner find enough food to feed around thirty people regularly when most people can’t even feed themselves?