Grey Moon
Chapter nine
Board
Notebook. Day 157.
I waited until midday. Then I wrote a note and left it under the wiper: out of fuel, gone north on foot, keeping to the main road. If he comes back he’ll know which way. I don’t think he’ll come back. I left it anyway.
I took what I could carry: the water, what food was left, the warm things, the notebook. The jar. I cut the air-holes in the lid bigger and wedged it into the top of the pack where I can see it. Ana told me how to feed the beetle, not how to carry it to England. I’m carrying it.
I left the car on the verge with the others and started walking. Last odometer reading: 84,891. No odometer after this — just the time and the road.
Notebook. Day 158.
I expected fighting. Everyone who pictured this pictured fighting — the last tins, the petrol, doors kicked in. There’s none of it. I’ve walked through three towns since the car and they’re quiet. Doors shut. A dog had taught itself to work a bin lid. An old man sat on a step and watched me pass and didn’t get up.
The ones my age and over are indoors, or slow on the pavements, like Lena. The ones who move with any purpose are young. They don’t run from me and they don’t ask me for anything. North of the second town a girl of fifteen or sixteen was carrying water in from somewhere, two smaller ones behind her in a line, and she nodded at me like I was weather.
I keep the jar in the top of the pack. It’s alive. I check.
Past the third town someone had put up a board, not a flyer but a sheet of plywood bolted to the signpost, painted white, lettered by hand and kept clean. I copied it.
[Notice — plywood, bolted to a signpost on the north road. Hand-lettered, French and English. Day 158. Copied.]
OPEN HOUSE — 3 KM NORTH
FOOD. WATER. A BED. A FIRE.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. LEAVE WHAT YOU CAN.
NO ONE IS TURNED AWAY.
LOOKING FOR SOMEONE?
THE BOARD IS HERE. WE WILL POST FOR YOU.
IT REACHES EVERYWHERE THAT STILL ANSWERS.
— LA MAISON DE LA ROUTE NORD / THE NORTH ROAD HOUSE
Notebook. Day 158.
I hadn’t meant to stop. Three kilometres off the line, England to reach, and I’ve never been good at taking things from people. They came out to the road anyway.
Two of them, a boy of seventeen or so and a smaller one. Not to stop me, just to walk a way and ask where I was going. When I said England the older one didn’t laugh. He said the house was more or less on the way, that I should eat and sleep, and that the Board was there if I was looking for anyone. The rest I could decide after.
The house had been a school. Maybe thirty living in it, none over forty. Teenagers, mostly, with a few in their twenties and thirties fetching and carrying alongside them. A fire in the yard under a steel hood, water carried from a well they’d reopened, a rota on the wall in a child’s careful capitals — who cooked, who fetched, who sat with the slow ones in the village. They fed me without ceremony: soup, bread, an egg. A girl asked my name and wrote it in a book.
I kept waiting for the catch — the price, the rule, the one in charge. There’s no one in charge. There’s a rota.
He stayed a day longer than he’d meant to. From the step where they’d put him he could watch most of the house without being in the way, and for most of a day that was what he did.
The lorry came in from the east at four, low on its springs, and a dozen of them unloaded it in a line without being told: sacks, crates, a drum of something, hand to hand into the old gym. Earlier two of the girls had gone down toward the village with a covered basket between them and come back without it; he gathered there were people down there who couldn’t come up, and that someone went to them every day.
They ate at dusk, at long tables dragged out under the steel hood — soup, bread, whatever the lorry had brought. A small girl cried through most of the meal, tired or remembering something, he couldn’t tell; the boy beside her kept an arm round her and went on eating and didn’t make her stop. Further down, a child was doing sums by lamplight.
He was not the only one they’d taken in. A man of about sixty had come up the road that afternoon and stood in the yard a while before he asked the thing Marko had wanted to ask and hadn’t — who was in charge. The girl he asked couldn’t have been seventeen. She said there wasn’t anyone, not the way he meant, and asked what he needed. The man didn’t have an answer ready. He had come to be told where to go, and there was no one whose job that was. He ate, slept in the gym, and by morning he was gone, as two others had gone while Marko watched, older people drifting up out of the south and out again, a meal, a night, then on to wherever they still believed the thing in charge was waiting.
Marko watched a man near his own age help two boys fold a tarpaulin. They let him take a corner, waited while he found the fold, thanked him at the end. The job had gone slower for his being in it. Nobody minded, and nobody gave him a second one. Marko was the same to them and he knew it: fed, made welcome, not needed. The one thing he had that the others didn’t was somewhere to be.
Notebook. Day 159.
None of it should hold. I spent twenty years paid to find the place a system breaks, and by everything I know this one is single points of failure end to end. It holds anyway. It holds because no one in it is trying to win.
Notebook. Day 160.
I meant to be gone at first light. I went to the Board instead, to put Ana’s name on the roads ahead of me. I have spent this whole journey checking things and sending nothing. Today I would send one thing.
They kept the Board in the old caretaker’s office — two laptops, a printer, a ledger gone soft at the corners, and a girl of nineteen or so who ran it off the panels on the gym roof. It worked, she told him, when the sun had been out; the houses passed messages between them at night, when the line was quiet. Slow, she said. But it got there.
He gave her the name — Ana Petrović, eight, last seen in London with her grandmother — and started to spell Petrović, the č for the people who don’t have it. She wasn’t writing. She was reading the screen. She asked him to spell his own name, which he’d given at the door his first night and thought nothing of, and when he had, she turned the laptop round so he could see.
There was already something under his name. It had come in two nights before, while he slept in the gym, and had been waiting. He copied it into the notebook.
[Board message — relayed from London, passed house to house. Held under the name MARKO at the North Road House. Day 160. Copied.]
ANA PETROVIĆ, AGE 8 — SAFE, LONDON. LOOKING FOR: MARKO, FREIBURG.
Her words, as the older ones wrote them down for her:
Dear Marko. The big children helped me put this on the board. Is Borko alive? The soft part, not the skin, and not the sun. I am keeping my book the way you keep yours, and I have written everything down. The big children are bringing me home. Have you heard from Papa? I have rung and rung and he does not answer. If you see him, tell him to ring me.
— Ana