by Alan McCormick
I wrote this story during Trump’s first Presidency when things were getting dark and lurching towards a kind of civil war. I originally called it ‘Where is the Light?’, and then it became ‘They are Coming’. ‘They are Coming’ worked for a long while but doesn’t reflect the reality of now, so I’ve called it ‘They Are Here.’
The world is set in a mustard hue, sun toxic, the dying of light. I arrive with two others, the last three standing. Frances has kept some tea back, scraped and rinsed mould from the dry leaves, and even has a jug of coffee warming on a portable gas burner. We’ll share it out, every last drop.
Mildred’s cafe has stood in the middle of town long before I was born. It’s been through several re-vamps but has settled into its final incarnation for as long as I can remember: the bright breezy posters extoling good health and civic responsibility – ‘Don’t waste’, ‘Think before you litter’, ‘Visit your elderly neighbour with kindness and laughter’ – the tired jukebox playing old sixties and seventies songs. For a long time, it’s been an outsiders’ community centre: lonely old people, young Mums with babies, politically inclined teenagers who rejected the local coffee chains and hipster cafes.
An ex-nun called Frances has run it ever since her partner Mildred died, and tonight she beckons us in, locks the door as soon as we’re safely inside, cluster bombs like thunder dropping in the neighbouring valley, rattling the windowpanes, sending plumes of smoke to smother the clouds. They’re close now.
Frances speaks first: ‘I won’t ask you to pray, there’s no time for that. Just reach out to the person next to you and give them a hug.’
I hug old Bill Masterson; even though I’ve hated him since he aimed a shotgun at my friends and me when we were teenagers. We’d let down the tyres on his lorry because he was known to be cruel to his animals. But here he is up close, the stench of fear sweated through his shirt. I feel a tremble deep in the bones of his chest, a cool dampness on the skin of his arms, the weakening of what was once surely a fierce hand grip before he steps back and looks at me with small clear blue eyes and says, ‘thank you, I’ve not felt another that close in years.’
I can tell he finds me familiar but can’t quite place me. It’s been years since he aimed the shotgun and I’d grown up, been away to university, only returning after we were ordered back to our hometowns.
‘You’re Charlie Reardon’s daughter,’ he says finally. ‘I’m sorry about your parents, no-one should go like that’ – a small glimmer of feeling for the enemy has long been his downfall, perceived as weakness by his kind, labelling him a collaborator and sealing his fate by our side in the café.
Last Christmas, his nephew, Gordon, had been standing on the opposite bank of the river, looking through a pair of binoculars towards our house.
‘He’s a freak, a flag waver,’ Dad said. ‘They’ll fall apart soon enough, start fighting amongst themselves, they always do.’
And then came a shot, fizzing through the lounge window, plugging into the far wall. A rapid series of shots followed, and the pane splintered, then gave way.
Back in the café, Frances is on the piano. A Tom Waits song ‘You’re innocent when you dream.’ She goes on to Nina Simone’s ‘Mister Bojangles’, getting out her favourites before the end, and not a dry eye in the house.
‘Coffee tastes like poison. But welcome all the same!’ shouts Mister Masterson, standing up, holding his mug in triumph.
‘Sit down, Bill,’ barks Miss Wendy, my first primary school teacher, still harsh as hell.
‘I’m thanking her, Wendy.’
‘Well, make sure you do, and no trouble, we’ve done with trouble.’
‘Done with trouble’: the resigned understated expression of the old.
The shots had been a warning. Soon it became clear they’d been making plans, and we just hadn’t taken enough notice. Everything happened so fast. Within weeks of being ordered back home, anyone designated as not belonging was ordered to ‘leave or be disappeared’. Many of us demonstrated against the crackdown and then came the roadblocks. The bridge over our river was closed. We were quarantined. Starved. Electricity and phone lines cut.
My parents were part of a group sent to negotiate. Days later, their bloated bloodless bodies floated back along the river, trenches of grey rotting flesh gouged into their necks.
I mourned as best as I could, but I couldn’t cry. I was in shock; it was too hard just keeping my senses together to survive for anything to be that real. Fear blew through the streets like a fever, hung to our clothes, and infected those of us left with a deranged unfathomable anger that couldn’t come out, and, after a while, as the hunger and cold took hold, we drew lots for the firing squad, huddled in the queue for the end.
*****
It had been a hot summer’s night when we’d crept into Masterson’s abattoir’s parking lot, the stench of dereliction, of rotting carcasses seeping from his sheds. We daubed ‘Animal Killer’ on the side of his lorry and let down its tyres.
He arrived into the night with the steel of his shotgun, glimmering from the beam of his torch. ‘What’s going on?’ he yelled.
‘Retribution!’ we shouted, hiding behind some bins by a wall.
But he was a wily old bastard, turned off his torch and snuck into the dark. Soon, he had John by the scruff of the neck, dragging him into the centre of the yard. He turned the torch on his face, the barrel of the gun at his temple.
’He gets it if you little fucks don’t show yourselves.’
One by one he started to draw us out, his attention taken by Marlon and Sheila who followed me into the yard.
‘Marlon Biggs and Sheila Trells! Both your fathers work for me, or at least they did.’
‘That’s not fair! Please, we’ll put right all we’ve done,’ said Marlon.
‘Fair, you want fair, I’ll show you fair,’ and he smashed the butt of the gun against the side of John’s head.
Marlon suddenly rushed him, and the gun fired. A bullet ricocheted off the lorry into the chest of Mister Masterson’s dog that had just appeared in the yard. We all stopped, and Mister Masterson fell to his knees and let out a long-anguished howl.
I noticed the worn scuffed soles of his boots, muddy water seeping from the cracks, the old bastard had worked them hard. His sobbing, the whimpering of his dog, his head bowed and defeated, we should have finished him off then.
*****
Frances slowly dances around the room. A Shangri-La song on the jukebox: ‘He’s the leader of the pack, vroom, vroom,’ she sings, directing her attention to Mister Masterson.
He grunts at her and shoos her away.
She beckons Miss Wendy onto the floor: ‘Come on, Wendy, why don’t you shape some moves like you used to?’
‘Have you gone mad?’
‘I have,’ she says. ‘Dregs left in heaven, coffee gone my brethren, but we know what we are about to receive and there’s no getting away from it, so I’d like some of the fun that’s owed me.’ She pulls down a rusty looking tea caddie from the shelf above the service counter. ‘Now the expiry date will be well passed but let’s not worry too much about that, shall we?’ She takes out a sheet of paper embossed in small orange smiley squares. She peels one of the squares away and places it on her tongue. ‘Ride the nausea, don’t let fear be your friend, just let go and a better world will be revealed. I suggest one stamp for the uninitiated and two for those experienced,’ and she swallows another and presents the sheet to me. ‘Nicki, take one and offer the rest around.’
I take one like a sacrament and offer the rest to the others. ‘Mister Masterson, will you?’
‘Why not?’ he says.
‘Miss Wendy?’
‘I spent my life fighting against drugs, banning them from school, so I’d be a hypocrite if I took one now.’
‘If you’re sure?’
‘Well, I’m not sure, Nicki, but you go ahead, I won’t report you,’ and she laughs, which sets Frances off, giggling and hooting like a hyena.
In the valley, the sound of explosions and thunder roll closer than ever. I’m on a path amongst a line of squat trees – brown trunks, wooden table legs – crawling on all fours – Bill Masterson is under the table sobbing like a baby, his coat – his dog reborn, swaddled in his arms – his hands covered in dog blood – ‘how do I know? – its colour, human blood is more . . . and when I close my eyes I see it like a river spewing from my parents’ opened necks – ‘Let it go’, ‘ride it out’ Frances advised – yellow mist, stomach fumes, could sick it all up or wait – I wait, Miss Wendy looks on, her primitive features full of gnarly wisdom – ‘you’re a tree,’ I tell her – Frances is dancing like a loon, teeth chattering, raising her spent shotgun over her head like an Apache – ‘I’m not your guide, girl,’ Frances says – and then, all of a sudden, I’m in a clearing crawling into the centre of the room, thunder above, red flashes against the windows – smoke snaking in under the door – Bill Masterson and Miss Wendy skulk out of the trees to join me. Wendy squats down and we all hold hands, Miss Wendy’s dry like bark – she is a tree! – we’re humming – I can’t make out the tune but we’re hitting the same note – and then the brightest of lights as they all charge in.
