White and Other Tales of Ruin

“When do we stop?” Doug asked, and wished he hadn’t. He saw Lucy-Ann staring at him but he kept facing forward.

“I don’t know. What’s the plan? Do we have one, other than leaving our home like … like rats from …?”

“Hey, come on, it was you as much as me! When they reported the first case in Paris — ”

“I’m sorry Doug,” she said quickly, and she squeezed his leg. He liked that, he always had. A touch could speak volumes.

In the back, Gemma worked her way down between the seats. Soon the acrid smell of urine filled the car.

Doug wanted to close his eyes, cry refreshing tears. There was a hot knot in his stomach: fear for his family; love for his daughter; a hopeless embarrassment at what she had been forced to do.

“Urine is sometimes used to treat the effects of jelly fish stings,” Gemma said suddenly, “especially in the tropics. Sometimes they can’t get normal medicines quickly enough, so they pee on the victims.”

He glanced over his shoulder at his daughter, crushed between the seats, knickers around her knees. What a strange thing to say …

She stared back at him wide-eyed.

He looked at Lucy-Anne, who appeared not to have heard, then decided to say nothing. There had been something in Gemma’s young eyes-an uncomfortable sense of loss in a day full of terror-and he did not want to scare her any more.

An hour later they left the motorway. Doug turned north, and Lucy-Anne did not object. Her silent acquiescence depressed him more than he could have imagined.

Within half an hour of leaving the M4 the traffic had thinned out considerably. People could leave the city, but it was not so easy for most of them to relinquish the motorways, as if the main roads could lead them somewhere safer.

It was almost midday.

Doug turned on the radio and scanned the channels. Mindless pop, classical tunes linked end to end without a presenter, a conversation on football which he recognised as being about a match played a year ago. A semblance of normality, but underpinned with the terrible hidden truth: that things had gone bad, and may never be good again. He slipped a tape into the player and REM started to piss him off.

Lucy-Anne twiddled her thumbs and only occasionally looked through the windscreen. Doug touched her leg now and then to reassure her, and also to comfort himself. He wished she would do the same back, but he had always been the more tactile one, the one who needed a touch as well as a smile to make him feel good. He glanced at her every now and then, wanting to do more but knowing that there was nothing he could

do. She knew as well as he that they were not escaping, but merely prolonging the inevitable.

He thought about death, and tried to divert his mind elsewhere. “You okay, honey?”

Gemma whispered that yes, she was okay, but she did not look up.

“So where are we going?” Lucy-Anne said to her hands.

Doug did not answer for a while. A recent signpost had pointed north to Birmingham and Coventry, but their direction so far had been dictated by chance as much as design. “North,” he said, because away from France was the best idea.

Lucy-Anne looked up. “Scotland,” she whispered.

“Well, we could try, but it depends on fuel and — ”

“No, we must go to Scotland! Uncle Peter lives near Inverness, we can go there, he’ll have us, he’ll look after us.” She was looking at him now, and her face had come alight. He hated the false hope he saw there.

“Who’s Uncle Peter?” Gemma said from the back seat.

Doug snorted. “Precisely.”

“Doug, he’s not a bad sort.”

“You haven’t seen him in over ten years. Hell, I think the last time was our bloody wedding!”

“He’s a bit eccentric, that’s all.”

“Does that mean he does odd things?” Gemma asked. “Only, I don’t mind that. I quite like people who do odd things.”

“We’ll go to see him, then,” Lucy-Anne said. “Won’t we, Dad?”

Doug nodded slowly, already beaten. They would go to see him, sure they would, but what then? That’s what was truly bothering him: what then? He had no answer, and seeking it would make him give in, curl into a ball and die.

“Edgar Allan Poe’s dying words were Lord help my soul

,” Gemma muttered under her breath.

“What?” Doug asked.

“Huh?”

“What did you say, honey?” Some cars passed the other way, one of them flashing its lights, but he ignored them. As far as he knew Gemma had never read any Poe, let alone read about the man.

“Nothing, Dad.”

“She’s tired and scared, Doug,” Lucy-Anne said quietly, so that the sound of the engine would cover her words. “Let’s just aim north and leave it at that. When we get there …” She trailed off without substituting the word when with if.

Doug mentally did it for her.

Another car passed with flashing lights, its driver waving frantically as he sped by.

“Now what?” Doug slowed the car and eased it around a bend in the A-road. When he saw what faced them his foot slipped from the accelerator, and the car drifted onto the grass verge and came to a halt. He forgot to use the brakes. For a while, he forgot even to breathe.