Concrete Island (7 page)

Maitland dragged the sheets of galvanized iron towards the steps. Laying them carefully between the lintel and the top step, he built a crude roof, adjusting the sheets so that the slope carried away the streaming rain. He threw the crutch down the steps and eased himself under the roof of his new shelter.

Sitting on the steps as the rain drummed at the metal roof over his head, Maitland took off the dinner-jacket and squeezed the sodden fabric in his bruised hands. The muddy water ran away between his fingers, as if he were washing out a child's football gear. He spread the jacket across the steps and massaged his shoulders, trying to draw a little warmth from the pressure of his hands. He could feel his fever returning, fed from the inflamed hip wound. Nonetheless, his success in building even this shabby shelter had revived him, rekindling his still unbroken determination to survive. As he was already well aware, it was this will to survive, to dominate the island and harness its limited resources, that now seemed a more important goal than escaping.

Maitland listened to the rain striking the galvanized iron. He remembered the house his parents had taken in the Camargue for their last summer together. The intense delta rain had fallen on the garage roof below the windows of the bedroom where he had happily spent most of the holiday. It was no coincidence that when he had first taken Helen Fairfax to the south of France they had gone straight to La Grande Motte, the futuristic resort complex on the coast a few miles away. Helen had quietly hated the hard, affectless architecture with its stylized concrete surfaces, nervous of Maitland's buoyant humour. At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine were with him – she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned in advance of itself.

Through the open doorway Maitland watched the pools of water covering the weed-grown basement into which the first floor had collapsed. A small printing shop had once been here, and a few copper-backed letterpress blocks lay around his feet. Maitland picked one up and examined the cloudy figures of a dark-suited man and a white-haired woman. As he listened to the rain he thought of his parents' divorce; the uncertainties of this period, when he was eight years old, seemed to be replicated in the negative image on the letterpress plate, in the reversed tones of this unknown man and woman.

An hour later, when the rain had ended, he climbed from his shelter. Holding tightly to the crutch, he hobbled back to the southern embankment. His fever continued to rise, and he gazed light-heartedly at the deserted causeways of the motorway.

When he reached the embankment and searched for the message he had scrawled on the white flank of the caisson, he found that all the letters had been obliterated.

9 Fever

T
HE
last of the rain fell across Maitland's face. He stared at the remains of the message he had inscribed on the damp concrete. The letters had been reduced to black smudges, the smeared rubber running to the ground at his feet.

Trying to concentrate, Maitland searched the ground for his rubber markers. Had someone wiped the letters away? Uncertain of himself and his ability to reason clearly, Maitland leaned unsteadily against the metal crutch. The fever poured from his chest and lungs. He realized that the rounded smears were exactly like those of a windshield wiper. He looked round wildly at the island and its deserted motorway embankments. Was he still trapped inside his car? Was the entire island an extension of the Jaguar, its windshield and windows transformed by his delirium into these embankments? Perhaps the windshield wipers had jammed and were flicking to and fro as he lay forward on his crushed chest across the steering wheel, tracing some incoherent message on the steaming glass …

The sunlight broke through the white cumulus to the east of the island, illuminating the high embankment like a spotlight switched on to a stage set. A truck laboured along the feeder road, the rectangular pantechnicon of a furniture van visible above the balustrade.

*   *   *

Maitland turned his back on the vehicle. Suddenly he no longer cared about the message and the obliterated letters. He swung himself roughly through the waist-high grass, soaking the torn fabric of his trousers and dinner-jacket against the rain-wet stems. In the over-bright sunlight the island and the concrete motorways glimmered with a hard vibrancy that surged through his crippled body. The grass flashed with an electric light, encircling his thighs and calves. The wet leaves wound across his skin, as if reluctant to release him. Maitland swung his injured leg over a ruined brick course. Somehow he must rally himself while he was still strong enough to move about.

No point in going back to the car, he told himself.

The grass seethed around him in the light wind, speaking its agreement.

‘Explore the island now – drink the wine later.'

The grass rustled excitedly, parting in circular waves, beckoning him into its spirals.

Fascinated, Maitland followed the swirling motions, reading in these patterns the reassuring voice of this immense green creature eager to protect and guide him. The spiral curves swerved through the inflamed air, the visual signature of epilepsy. His own brain – the fever, perhaps damage to his cerebral cortex …

‘Find a ladder –?'

The grass lashed at his feet, as if angry that Maitland still wished to leave its green embrace. Laughing at the grass, Maitland patted it reassuringly with his free hand as he hobbled along, stroking the seething stems that caressed his waist.

Almost carried by the grass, Maitland climbed on to the roof of an abandoned air-raid shelter. Resting here, he inspected the island more carefully. Comparing it with the motorway system, he saw that it was far older than the surrounding terrain, as if this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by the exercise of a unique guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust.

Parts of the island dated from well before World War II. The eastern end, below the overpass, was its oldest section, with the churchyard and the ground-courses of Edwardian terraced houses. The breaker's yard and its wrecked cars had been superimposed on the still identifiable streets and alleyways.

In the centre of the island were the air-raid shelters among which he was sitting. Attached to these was a later addition, the remains of a Civil Defence post little more than fifteen years old. Maitland climbed down from the shelter. Supported by the grass blades swirling around him like a flock of eager attendants, he hobbled westwards down the centre of the island. He crossed a succession of low walls, partly buried under piles of discarded tyres and worn steel cable.

Around the ruin of a former pay-box, Maitland identified the ground-plan of a post-war cinema, a narrow single-storey flea-pit built from cement blocks and galvanized iron. Ten feet away, partly screened by a bank of nettles, steps ran down to a basement.

Looking at the shuttered pay-box, Maitland thought unclearly of his own childhood visits to the local cinema, with its endless programmes of vampire and horror movies. More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head. His movement across this forgotten terrain was a journey not merely through the island's past but through his own. His infantile anger as he shouted aloud for Catherine reminded him of how, as a child, he had once bellowed unwearyingly for his mother while she nursed his younger sister in the next room. For some reason, which he had always resented, she had never come to pacify him, but had let him climb from the empty bath himself, hoarse with anger and surprise.

Too exhausted to press on, Maitland sat on a stone wall. Around him the high nettles rose into the sunlight, their tiered and serrated leaves like the towers of Gothic cathedrals, or the porous rocks of a mineral forest on an alien planet. Hunger contracted his stomach in a sudden spasm, forcing him to vomit on to his knees. He wiped away the phlegm and hobbled across the brick courses to the southern embankment.

Losing consciousness for short intervals, he wandered to and fro, his eyes unfocused, following the blunted end of the crutch.

As he tottered about, Maitland found himself losing interest in his own body, and in the pain that inflamed his leg. He began to shuck off sections of his body, forgetting first his injured hip, then both his legs, erasing all awareness of his bruised chest and diaphragm. Sustained by the cold air, he moved through the grass, looking round calmly at those features of the island he had come to know so well during the past days. Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker's yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged. He would leave his right leg at the point of his crash, his bruised hands impaled upon the steel fence. He would place his chest where he had sat against the concrete wall. At each point a small ritual would signify the transfer of obligation from himself to the island.

He spoke aloud, a priest officiating at the eucharist of his own body.

‘I am the island.'

The air shed its light.

10 The air-raid shelter

T
RAFFIC
drummed above his head. Smoke rose from a cigarette butt tossed into the grass a few feet from his face. Maitland watched the smoke entwine itself through the tall blades, which leaned towards him, swaying in the late afternoon sunlight as if urging him to his feet. He sat up, trying to clear his mind. The fever had soaked his body, burning the raw skin beneath his beard.

On all sides of the island the traffic moved along the motorways. Steadying himself, Maitland fixed his eyes on the distant cars. He climbed to his feet, hanging himself from the crutch like a carcass on a butcher's hook. High above him, the illuminated surface of the route indicator shone like a burning sword in the dark sky.

Maitland found a last rubber marker in his jacket pocket. On the drying concrete he scrawled:

CATHERINE   HELP   TOO   FAST

The letters wound up and down the slope. Maitland concentrated on the spelling, but ten minutes later, when he returned after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the Jaguar, they had been rubbed out as if by some dissatisfied examiner.

MOTHER   DONT   HURT   POLICE

He waited in the long grass beside the embankment, but his eyes closed. When he opened them, the message had vanished.

He gave up, unable to decipher his own writing. The grass swayed reassuringly, beckoning this fever-racked scarecrow into its interior. The blades swirled around him, opening a dozen pathways, each of which would carry him to some paradisial arbour. Knowing that unless he reached the shelter of the Jaguar he would not survive the night, Maitland set his course for the breaker's yard, but after a few minutes he followed the grass passively as it wove its spiral patterns around him.

To his surprise, it carried him up a slope of steeper and more difficult ground, over the roof of the largest of the air-raid shelters. Maitland laboured along, listening to the grass seethe around him. A stony ridge marked the west wall of the shelter. Maitland paused there. The curving roof fell away on either side, disappearing into the dense undergrowth that sprang from the floor of the pit.

The grass was silent now, as if waiting for Maitland to make some significant move. Wondering why he had climbed on to the shelter, Maitland caught sight of the overturned taxi in the breaker's yard. He turned with his last strength to reach the Jaguar. Before he could catch himself he slipped on the rain-damp roof. He fell heavily, and slid down the rounded slope into the grass and nettles, plunging through them like a diver vanishing into the deeps of an underground cavern.

*   *   *

Submerged in this green bower, Maitland lay for some time in a hammock of crushed nettles. The dense grass and the foliage of a stunted elder sealed off all but a faint glow of the late afternoon sunlight, and he could almost believe that he was lying at the bottom of a calm and peaceful sea, through which a few bars of faint light penetrated the pelagic quiet. This silence and the reassuring organic smell of decaying vegetation soothed his fever.

A small, sharp-footed creature moved across his left leg, its claws clutching for purchase in the worn fabric of his trousers. It darted in brief scurries, reaching up his thigh to his groin. Opening his eyes, Maitland peered through the dim light, recognizing the long muzzle and nervous eyes of a brown rat drawn to him by the scent of the blood leaking from his hip. An open wound disfigured the creature's head, exposing the skull, as if it had recently torn itself from a trap.

‘Get out – aah!' Maitland leapt forward, seizing the metal crutch in the elder branches above his head. He thrashed wildly at the foliage, beating back the walls of his green cell.

The rat had gone. Maitland forced his left leg through the branches to the ground below and stepped out into the fading evening light. He was standing in a sunken passage that ran along the western wall of the shelter. Here the vegetation had been cut back, forming a rough slope that ran down the bank to the doorway of the shelter.

‘Tools…!'

Fumbling excitedly with the crutch, Maitland lurched down the passage, his fever and injured leg forgotten. When he reached the door he wiped away the sweat that soaked his face and forehead. A chromium padlock and chain locked the door. Maitland forced the crutch inside the chain and jerked it from its mountings.

Kicking back the door, Maitland hobbled forward into the shelter. A sweet but not unpleasant smell greeted him, as if he were stepping into the lair of some large and docile creature. In the fading light he could see that the shelter was an abandoned beggar's hovel. A line of faded quilts hung from the ceiling and covered the walls and floor. A pile of blankets formed a small bed, and the sole pieces of furniture were a wooden chair and table. From the back of the chair hung a ragged leotard, the faded costume of some pre-war circus acrobat.