A diamond white car
on a coal black night
in driving rain
on Mansfield Road.
Hearts in the car pump to Drum'n'bass; and woozy eyes roll around uncertain heads:
alcohol
adrenaline
aggression
amphetamine.
A figure is made out, pedestrian, walking slowly along the roadside, distinguished by the light of a low moon, and in the glare of an oncoming tanker. The off-side passenger rolls down his window, and allows the fighting gale into the comfort of the car. A missile is found, Newcastle Brown; wielded and aimed. The pedestrian is on the brow of a small hill. Biceps tense. The car's lights pick out the shadow more clearly.
They jeer from the car, words eaten by the gale: crumpled in the melee to the walker's stern. He cannot make out the taunt, but he heard a sound, perhaps the muffled shout, or the car, or its music, perhaps the rasp of water, and of tyres, and tarmac. Whatever he heard, the pedestrian turns.
And revealed is not his face, but a mask, the opaque black visor of a military gas mask. Three filters. One facing forwards, one to the left, and the other to the right. All the passenger can see of his victim is the dazzle of the headlights in the stranger's blank visor expression. The car passes Neil without the bottle being thrown.
He wears a complete protective suit when he walks home. It's waterproof, fume proof, and vandal proof.
Edwinstowe, Ravenscar, Hucknall, Warsop. You could smell those towns -- if you didn't filter them through activated charcoal. But the air's much cleaner now, no pits, no coke-works, no British Coal, no NCB, just those bottles of Newcastle Brown. Further north, even Markham Main, super-pit, faith in the future, is closed.
It is so difficult to triangulate where we are, to precisely declare, in space and time where Neil is walking. It is such an effort to explain. There are families and neurotransmitters, there is ecstasy and paranoia, and there is the slow walk into the sea.
Nuclear
Chemical
Biological
NCB
Three years earlier, and Neil is eighteen years old, and has Hammer-righted his room black. For ten years he has lived on antibiotics and prayed that the Russians stay their onslaught for one more night. He should be brave, and should sleep without fear, he should be solid and stalwart, and laugh at the face of death. But each night he asks for unique dispensation from God; a God he is certain cannot exist.
Neil is mising a diagnosis. His immune system simply under-performs: there seems to be no underlying cause. On his wall is a hand-drawn map of the forces of the powers. A red border around the east, and a blue around the west.
They say that he is clever, that he could go far. The direction of progress is measured by the distance Ravenscar. But University would spoil Neil's dream of the End Times, dreams that the Kraken will wake soon, and swallow the world. And if he's alive when the dust settles, he will dance on the plague pits. And of one thing he is certain. He will not to be part of its coming; not an iota responsbile for the fall.
For ten years he has lived on antibiotics and prayed that the Russians would launch their bombs.
His collection of non-conventional warfare suits is amongst the most comprehensive in the country. As well as NATO suits, which you can order simply by walking into one of a couple of bondage shops in Hockley, if you know the right people, he has Chinese and Soviet suits which are much more complicated to obtain. The suits are arranged in the garage, in chronological order: in order of decreasing engagement. Teller wore oil-film welding goggles and sun-tan lotion. Since then, the fashion has been to increase separation.
Occasionally people will come around, libertarians usually, often American, to look at his suits. Usually they try on one or two, and darkly describe from behind prespex, the consitutional armoury which they buried beneath the yard. Once a survivalist had his truck burnt out whilst he was looking around Neil's collection. Which happens. The guy asked him how he could get back to Nottingham on a Sunday night. Neil told him that if he followed the A60, he'd get to Nottingham soon enough. But the guy ordered a taxi, which he called a cab, and cursed barbaric England.
Rivalling Neil's collection of chemical suits, at least in extent and meticulous curation, were his used needles, blackened spoons, and empty ampules, which he collected from around the estates. But though Neil's attentions were fairly divided, this collection drew fewer visitors than his other. He kept this archive under his bed, in amunition chests, which he had found on a tip in Colwick.
A civil defence unit, an amateur affair which meets once a month in the welfare, have Neil's name on a list, so that he can be contacted, in case of the collapse of civilisation, as they feel he could contribute.
Neil likes corned beef sandwiches. He sits in his window after college, and eats sandwiches. He watches the world walk by and wonders when he will be called.
Neil was never bullied at school. Like an old testament God, he was strong, and though generally retiring and self-effacing, has also been known, from time to time, to kick the living shit out of someone he happens to dislike.
Neil's brother borrowed one of his suits in the late nineties, when Neil was out of the house. Then he got the bus to Eastwood, and wandered around IKEA.
Some say that Neil's brother is away with the fairies, and others say he's mentally ill. He's not very ill, they say, just a little strange. He's older than Neil, but he hasn't a job. Mark hadn't shown any interest in Neil's protection suits before the day he went into the garage, donned a Soviet submarine nuclear decontamination suit and hopped on the bus to Eastwood.
Mark got off on the edge of Giltbrook, and walked to IKEA. Customers and staff, strangely unconcerned, simply moved out of his way. Eventually, a supervisor was called. Mark was sitting on a sofa, still fully protected, in a fake IKEA living room, watching a painted picture on a cardboard television, when security guards came, to take him away.
Mark couldn't hear what they were saying, but he knew why the guards had come. He left under his own steam, with out any need for man-handling. He sat outside the store, in the multi-acre car park, next to a board describing how DH Lawrence once lived near-by. He took off his mask and lit a cigarette.
Mark helped Neil maintain his needle collection. Unemployed and wandering around north Nottinghamshire, he was ideally placed to scout for aqcuisitions.
Neil's father, like many of the Nottinghamshire miners, had eventually voted against the strike. He hadn't wanted a revolution, he'd wanted a job. It's easy to be united when a cause is hopless, but whiloe there's hope, there's poison.
You'd think that this was cursed land, Nottinghamshire, infected with an endemic disease, `a scab county', but he told himself that anywhere else could have done the same.
And in ninety-three when Roy Lynk staged his sit in, and the past came back to haunt him, Neil and Mark's father sat in front of the telly and got pissed on cheap vodka. He hated the man, but he had promised him work.
He had heard every insults since, from the street preachers selling rags on the corner of Carrington Street, holidaying in Cuba, declaring him a class traitor, that grabbed bread for his family, whilst the rest of the country were glorious in defeat. In ninety four when he saw a televised concert from America, where the Manics played Gold against the Soul, he smashed the telly with his fist, ran into the streets and shouted at the top of his voice, to cross the Atlantic, challenging their certainty that they would not have done the same.
He got out of mining in the late eighties, he saw ninety-three coming, because he'd been offered a job in a consultancy in Doncaster, working in occupational safety. He'd had trained in safety and risk assessment whilst down the pit, and the consultancy decided it would give them an air of legitimacy to have an ex-miner on the letterhead, alongsides the MBAs and graduate engineers. If there were going to be more big lay-offs, then if he went first, he would stand more chance of getting a job. A friend from The Welfare had cracked up and been sectioned, and he knew that wasn't for him.
In eighty nine, before the wall came down, the business got a contract to prepare a standard symbolic signage in the event of a civil emergency, disease, chemical spills, and nuclear war. He designed signs to denote no entry, pass with care, the authorities are in control here. When the police closed down the village in the eighties, they were in control, trying to keep out the flying pickets. It was all being done in his strike-breaking name, but they checked his pass all the same, and called a curfew, and blocked roads. He had hated the police for that, and wasn't sure who he feared the most. A striker once punched him to the floor in the co-op. He was scared and fearful, fighting for his own, and he could hardly hate him. But the police, he now hated to the core, who fought to let him work.
It was a civil war. But the authorities were in control.
His new job was, he decided, rather pointless. He'd sit there with a thick black marker pen and draw squiggles on A3 paper, a cartoon of the situation, drawn by someone devoid of art. They praised their simplicity, and iconic structure. Neil's dad would spend most of his day sitting and hoping that there was never a need to use the symbols he drew for Mutually Assured Destruction. And occasionally, he would check that the top drawer of his desk was still locked. A year or so after the symbols had been established, the old order collapsed, and the threat not so much evaporated as expanded to fill the available space.
Neil's dad's symbols were used for the first time during the Gulf War, where they seemed to function well enough, as well as any symbols might. In the office they sat and watched the bomb-by-bomb coverage, beside the ad-breaks, the interviews, and the would-be strategists playing in sand pits. And he checked that the top drawer of his desk was locked.
Neil's collection of protective suits grew to include a Gulf War section. He was a little disappointed after the Berlin wall collapsed. In ninety Neil took down his poster of opposing forces and the wall seemed a little bare and clean where the poster had hung. He learnt to pick locks.
Mark stubbed out his cigarette on the sketch of DH Lawrence and headed home from IKEA. He hadn't found any needles that day. Mark looked for a pin-prick hole in Neil's suit, which he knew would be there. In about ninety four, when Mark was drinking heavily, he had woken one day with a hangover powerful enough to kill a cow. Angry at the world in general, he went to Neil's room and opened his needle collection, and found a particularly vicious looking one. Mark went to the garage and punctured every one of Neil's suits, and he never told him, or even the people who kept the list, in case of emergencies.
Mark had a short time when his only ambition was to be able to drink as much as Arthur Seaton. His teacher -- he was taught one-to-one -- a Marxist from somewhere unremarkable and southern -- had decided that they would read together Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It was regional literature. Mark was taught on his own, owing to his slowness of reading. They only managed a couple of chapters, the book was far too difficult for Mark, but he remembered that Arthur could drink thirteen pints and tumble down the stairs. And so could Mark. He broke his leg, a hairline fracture on the ornamental iron banister. The police dragged him away from Yates's to spend a night in the cells. He simply formed a walk-on part in a slow-burning riot in the Old Market Square. When they let him out, he got a bus to City Hospital, where they sorted out his leg.
Neil preferred Saturday Night at the Greyhound, to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Neil had an uncle in Ashover, and he'd convinced him that people who retire to the Peak District for the scenery, and to mix with the quintessential peasantry deserved what they had coming to them. He had two dogs in order to channel Mrs. Tapin. His father's consultancy was doing well, their signs had been adopted by ISO and the US army, so they bought new office furniture.
Most weekends, Neil and Mark would go to Nottingham on the bus. Neil's girlfriend, Gwen, lived in a block of flats at the bottom of Carlton Hill. Neil had met Gwen when he had gone along with Mark to spot trains at Netherfield Junction. Mark sat by the old station with an old pad of paper, collecting numbers, and Neil kicked his way through the junk.
Gwen approached Neil directly. She was eighteen at the time and wearing a silver stretch top and a short black PVC skirt. He had no idea why she would be in such a place, though she could probably have seen him from the flat, he was sure he was not such an attraction to warrant a special visit.
She asked why the two of them were there, and he replied, and so they talked for a while. Without warning, she pressed him against a wall of the railway viaduct, and placed his hand on her thigh. Neil wasn't wearing a protection suit. She yanked his hand upwards, hitching her skirt, and smiled at him. Grabbing him by the hand, she pulled him to the flats. Mark didn't notice they were missing.
Gwen was sensible, she took chemical contraceptives, and Neil wore a condom. He didn't feel uncomfortable in one, it was all that he knew. She wouldn't be accidentally pregnant. It came as a surprise to everyone, but the relationship lasted. Neil was one of the few lads who didn't mind her sleeping with other men. On future visits, Mark played with Owen on his game console, whilst Neil spent time with Gwen.
Neil was given his dad's old desk, and they put it in his room, which was still Hammer-righted black. He picked the lock and found nothing more than a pile of papers relating to the safety of grain silos. He didn't them check very carefully.
They never did find out what was wrong with Neil's immune system. He had been on antibiotics for twenty years. Neil would sit on the bus, on the way to Owen and Gwens, and try to will his body into health. Mark didn't speak much unless he was spoken to, so Neil could sit in comfortable silence and concentrate hard on his body.
Neil's mum was chgnaing doctors, and she was looking for her NHS card. She searched the unlocked draw of Neil's desk, and flicked through the papers.
At first she stood in dumb silence, her hand over her mouth. But in a moment the slight woman emitted a scream from the depths of her belly, that it brought people to the windows on the other side of the street. Neighbours came to find out what had happened, but she kept her door on the chain, and wouldn't let them in. She told them all to go to hell, and called the vicar. There are only two rules in a crisis, don't call the police, and don't call the DSS.
That day, Neil's dad had gone into work and habitually checked the top drawer of his desk -- of his new desk. He was surprised to find it open and empty, and it took him a moment to remember that this was new furniture. His heart jumping, he had spent the rest of the day doing no work at all, and raced home at the earliest possible moment, without indicating that anything surprising had happened. Neil's mum let the vicar in, and eventually stopped shouting.
Gwen told Neil of a place which she would visit regularly, where she had gone the previous night, and found something which had scared her.
She would visit a pool on the outskirts of Chesterfield, where the water is absolutely clear. The pool is quite deep, nine or twelve foot deep, but you can see the bottom with perfectly clarity. There are flints and strange large pebbles there, covering the bottom. The flints seemed to have been sharpened into spear-heads or daggers. Layer upon layer covered the base of the pond. And because the pool was so clear, and the bottom of it so beautiful she visited the place regularly. She would fancy that many of them had been stone-age flints, though she knew it more likely that they were nothing of the sort. It was called the Gar Pool.
That night she had visited the pool again. This time she noticed, for the first time, a brick hut, the size of a largeish shed, on the far side of the pool. She went to investigate it, and found the door unlocked and open. Stepping inside, she was amongst a complex maze of pipework. Not interested, she went to turn to leave. But as she turned there she caught a glimpse of death's skull in the corner of her eye. She turned her head back, so as to look again. The apparition was merely a sign, attached to a pipe and denoting poison. Suddenly, all around her she saw danger signs, toxic, corrosive, harmful. But it was the horror of the skull which remained.
Gwen paniced, and then worried at her panicing. She inched her way backwards out of the hut, and closed the door bhind her. On the door was a sign, with the words
"Danger: Toxic. Environment Agency.
A&M Tannery Site.
Settling reservoir."
She relived every time she had visited the pool. Had she touched the water? drunk the water? Was this why the water was fo pure? Was it disinfected? Was there no algae, no cloud, becuause nothing could live in that poision? Were the flints and stones on the bed of the pool merely some kind of catalyst?
When she got off the bus, she ran into her flat, into her room, and collapsed onto her bed, thinking. For three hours she lay and thought. Then Neil arrived. He heard the story curiously, but found it hard to understand her agitation. He tried to explain that the risk was likely to be incredibly small. She told him to be quiet.
Gwen suddenly sat up and began to quiz Neil intensely.
``You don't want kids, do you Neil?''
Neil was shocked: it wasn't even on his radar.
``No you know that. Not yet. But we're always careful, aren't we?''
``That's it Neil. I'm sorry, but that's it. You're so clean, so sweet,
but I don't think that's not what I need, now. I need to survive,
Neil. And you can't help me. You're so pure it will be the death of
me, Neil.''
``What is all this Gwen? What's this got to do with the pool? It's
just an old tank. I don't understand.''
``It's over Neil. I'm sorry. It's over.''
Neil tried to buy time to think.
``We could have kids, Gwen, I suppose.''
``I'm sorry Neil. I really am.''
Neil travelled back on the train in silence and only by the time he reached Bulwell did he realise he'd left Mark with Owen. He travelled back to Netherfield and collected him. It was too late for the train, so they got the late bus back together. They sat in silence.
For over a year, Neil dreamt of the sterile pool whenever he had been thinking of Gwen. It began to haunt his imagination. It had all seemed so arbritrary, so unexplained. Then one night, he put on a suit and headed to find the pool, to end the posession. He searched the scrubland for much of the night, until the sky turned navy, and early birds began to sing. But he could find no pool: it did not exist.
On his way home, he slowly decided that the pool had been of Gwen's invention, constructed in a dream, and which now was haunting him. Still, he found it hard to understand.
Neil got back to find his mother in the front room weeping. Spread before her were fifty photographs of young children in sexual positions. Neil, in shock, stammered his innocence, but she knew that they were his father's.
Neil's father did nothing with the photographs which he had locked in his drawer. He never looked at them: he kept them locked tight shut. He didn't even find them arousing, it would have been hard for him to explain. He had been offered them down The Grove on a Saturday night, he couldn't remember what led to the deal. But, locked in his office table, as he scribbled Mutually Assured Destruction in nursery symbols, there lying beneath the surface, lay a taboo which some how potentiated the world, the horror of which made his skin crawl. He would check that his desk was still locked.
Neil's mum and dad had separated, and had started proceedings for divorce. Mark found his father dead one cold Saturday morning in autumn, hanged by electrical flex over his bedroom door. The parish vicar officiated at the service gracefully, and didn't mention what he had seen in the barred house, a month before.
A year later Neil left his mother, who had found a job stitching, at a clothing factory on the out-skirts of Alfreton. Neil left her with Mark. He had wanted Mark to come with him, but Mark had wanted to stay to look after his mother. Mother had wanted to look after him, strange being that he was, as no one understood. Mark never learnt of the photographs.
But Neil moved to Hertfordshire, to Hitchin, where he rented a house amongst houses which looked very much the same. He took with him his suits, but left Mark the needles. Unpacking the suits to hang in the walk-in wardrobe of his new place, he noticed a tiny pin prick in one of them. Checking the rest, he found they had all been punctured. Neil was livid. But he blamed the punctures on the move, on some sharp object, a packing staple, perhaps, in the tea-chest. He should have been more careful. As they did for his father before him, Neil was removed from the list of people to contact in case of civil emergency.
Neil threw away the suits with the rubbish that weekend, but he kept the gas-masks. Neil never got a bed, he just slept in a sleeping bag in the spare room. He never lit the boiler either: he drank vodka to keep warm. Neil laid everything out in the big empty space of the main room, all of his clothes, and a small puddle of other things. He lived down the road from a twenty four hour supermarket where he'd go to buy ice cream in the early hours, if he was feeling down. It didn't make him feel much better, but it was something to do.
Then, Neil found a job at a bed factory, as a salesman. The others all thought that Neil was a bit odd; he probably had a difficult childhood. Every week the salesmen went to a characterless sixties brick pub, around the corner from the office, and talked about selling beds. It sapped Neil's the will to live. The first three decades of his life in Nottinghamshire had become a blur of nonsense. He had no connections there any more.
Sometimes Neil would wander into the new shopping centre they had built, and attract the attention of the centre's security guards for wandering around the place in a gas-mask, in memory of Mark. Its strangeness fascinated him. Every shop front he passed was as the blank facade of a riot-policeman's mask and shield. He would sit by the loading yard, and would struggle with the very idea of commerce.
He knew from a noticeboard in the car park (this one some hundred miles from where DH Lawrence once lived) that there were a hundred and fifty shops, all the shops necessary for modern life, but he couldn't hold the idea of a single one of them from behind his mask. What shops were here, and what did these signs mean? There was probably a bakers, he decided, because with his mask removed there was an occasional smell of bread.
Neil was certain that he was heading for insanity. At home that night he considered how he might escape. He had seen his dad hanged, and it didn't attract him. He would join the anonymity of the army, but thirty is too old for the army. Neil searched for an occupation to escape with. After looking in vain for weeks, he found an advert, one Firday, in the local newspaper. A general dogsbody was required, in an ice-station in British Antarctica. After two interviews and a physical, Neil won the job.
Born on a Thursday, it had been said that Neil would go far. He ended his days in Antarctica. He found someone at the station, whose warmth he would share at night: he was a scientist in the British Antarctic survey.
Neil suffocated in the fire which consumed Greenstone Station. In the last moments, struggling for breath but almost safe in the open, he loosened his grip.