Christopher Priest - Darkening Island

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DARKENING ISLAND

by Christopher Priest

Flyleaf:

War has devastated the African continent. Millions of homeless, hungry

refugees have fled to other lands. In England, as more and more Africans

arrive and set up communities, normal life soon begins to disintegrate, with

the entire population irrevocably factionalized into the Afrims and their

supporters; the right-wing government and its supporters; and the ever-growing

British civilian refugee group, ousted from its communities by the Afrims.

Forced by violence to leave their home in London, Alan and Isobel

Whitman attempt to drive to Bristol with their daughter, Sally, to seek

shelter with relatives. But the car breaks down and the Whitmans find

themselves at the mercy of roving bands from the various factions. Separated

from and reunited with his family, forced to suffer from indignities and

dangers, torn by loyalities and sympathies, Alan is unable to give his

allegiance to any of the three warring groups until a final brutal decision is

made for him.

In this, his second novel, Christopher Priest dramatically explores the

inevitable outcome of human prejudice and hatred. This is an engrossing,

frightening and irresistible story.

to friends

First published in England under the title

_Fugue for a Darkening Island_.

reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be

used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except

in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For

information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 49 East 33rd Street, New

York, N.Y. 10016.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 06-013407-0

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-181660

I have white skin. Light brown hair. Blue eyes. I am tall: five feet,

eleven inches. My mode of dress tends to the conservative: sports jackets,

corduroy trousers, knitted ties. I wear spectacles for reading, though they

are more an affectation than a necessity. I smoke cigarettes to a moderate

amount. Sometimes I drink alcohol. I do not believe in God; I do not go to

church; I do not have any objections to other people doing so. When I married

my wife, I was in love with her. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I have

no political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

My skin is smudged with dirt. My hair is dry, salt-encrusted and itchy.

I have blue eyes. I am tall: five feet, eleven inches. I am wearing now what I

was wearing six months ago, and I smell abominably. I have lost my spectacles,

and learned to live without them. I do not smoke at all most of the time,

though when cigarettes are available I smoke them continually. I am able to

get drunk about once a month. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church.

When I last saw my wife, I was cursing her, though I have learned to regret

it. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I do not think I have political

ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

I met Lateef in a village ruined by an artillery bombardment. I disliked

him the moment I saw him, and it was evidently reciprocated. After the first

moments of caution, we ignored each other. I was looking for food in the

village, knowing that as the bombardment had finished only recently it would

not yet be in a totally plundered state. There were several houses still

intact and I ignored these, knowing from experience that the groundtroops

habitually ransacked these first. It was more fruitful to sift through the

rubble of partially destroyed buildings.

Working methodically, I had filled two haversacks with canned food by

midday, and had stolen for future barter three road-maps from abandoned cars.

I did not see the other man again during the morning.

On the outskirts of the village I found a field which had evidently been

cultivated at one time. In one corner I discovered a row of freshly-dug

graves, each marked with a simple piece of wood upon which were stapled metal

dog-tags bearing the name of the soldier. I looked at each of the names, and

deduced that they were African troops.

As that part of the field was the most secluded I sat down near the

graves, and opened one of the cans. The food was odious: half-cooked and

greasy. I ate it hungrily.

Afterwards, I walked out to the wreck of the helicopter that had crashed

near by. It was not likely to contain food, though if any instruments were

recoverable they would be suitable for future exchanges. I needed a compass

most of all, though it was not likely that the helicopter would have carried

one that would be either easily detachable or portable. When I reached the

wreck I saw that the man I had seen earlier was inside the smashed cockpit,

working at the dashboard with a long-bladed knife in an attempt to remove an

altimeter. When he became aware of my presence he straightened slowly, his

hand moving towards a pocket. He turned to face me, and for several minutes we

regarded each other carefully, each seeing in the other a man who responded to

a situation in the same way as himself.

We decided we would have to abandon our house in Southgate the day the

barricade was erected at the end of our road. The decision was not implemented

at once; for several days we thought we would be able to adjust to the new

mode of life.

I do not know who took the decision to erect the barricade. As we lived

at the far end of the road, near to the edge of the playing-fields, we did not

hear the noises in the night, but when Isobel took the car down the road to

take Sally to school she returned almost at once with the news.

It was the first concrete sign in our lives that irrevocable change was

taking place in the country. Ours was not the first of such barricades, but

there were few others in our particular neighbourhood.

When Isobel told me about it I walked down to see it for myself. It did

not appear to be very strongly constructed -- made mostly of wooden supports

and barbed-wire loops -- but its symbolism was unmistakable. There were a few

men standing around, and I nodded cautiously to them.

The following day, we were at home when the noise of the eviction of the

Martins disturbed us. The Martins lived almost opposite us. We had not had

much to do with them, and since the Afrim landings had allowed them to keep to

themselves. Vincent Martin worked as a research technician at an

aircraftcomponents factory in Hatfield. His wife stayed at home, looking after

their three children. They were West Indians.

At the time of their eviction I had nothing to do with the Street Patrol

which was responsible for it. Within a week, though, all men in the street had

been enrolled, and every member of their families was given a pass-ticket

which had to be carried at all times as identification. We saw the

pass-tickets as potentially the most valuable possessions we had, as by this

time we were no longer blind to the developments around us.

Cars were allowed in and out of the street only at certain times, and

the barricade-patrols enforced this rule with absolute inflexibility. As the

street opened on to a main road which government regulations kept clear of all

parked traffic after six in the evening, it meant that if you arrived home

after the barricade had closed, you were required to find somewhere else to

park the car. As most streets quickly followed our example and closed their

entrances, the effect of this was that you were obliged to leave your car at

some considerable distance from home, and walking the rest of the way at such

a time was hazardous in the extreme.

The normal strength of a Street patrol was two men, though on a few

occasions this was doubled, and on the night before we finally decided to

leave there were fourteen men. I was part of a patrol three times; sharing the

duty with a different man each time. Our function was simple. While one man

stayed at the barricade with the shotgun, the other walked up and down the

Street four times. The positions were then reversed, and so on through the

night.While I was at the barricade, I was always most frightened of a

police-car coming along. Although I did see their cars on many occasions, none

of them ever stopped. During meetings of the Patrol committee, the question of

what to do insuch an event was often raised, but no satisfactory answer, at

least to my mind, was ever given.

In practice, we and the police would leave each other alone, though one

did hear stories of battles between the occupants of barricaded streets and

riot-shielded police. No news of these ever appeared in the newspapers or on

television, and the absence was more noticeable than the news itself would

have been.

The true purpose of the shotgun was to deter illegal squatters from

attempting to enter our street, and secondarily to show as a form of protest

that if the government and the armed forces were unable or unwilling to

protect our homes then we would take the matter into our own hands. Such was

the essence of what was printed on the backs of our pass-tickets, and was the

unspoken creed of the men on the street patrol.

For my own part, I was uneasy. The burnt-out shell of the Martins' house

opposite ours was a constant reminder of the violence inherent in the patrols,

and the never-ending parade of homeless shambling through the night past the

barricades was disturbing in the extreme.

The night the barricade on the next street fell, I was asleep. I had

heard that the patrol was to be enlarged, but it was not my turn of duty.

Our first awareness of the fighting was the firing of a shot nearby;

while Isobel took Sally downstairs to shelter in the space beneath the

staircase, I dressed hurriedly and went to join the patrol at the barricade.

Here, the men of the street stared sullenly at the army lorries and police

vans parked across the main road. About thirty armed soldiers faced us,

evidently nervous and trigger-happy.

Three water-cannons rumbled past, and disappeared through the jumble of

parked vehicles towards the next street. From time to time we heard more

shots, and the sound of voices raised angrily. Occasionally, the explosions

were deeper and more powerful, and slowly a red glow brightened near by. More

army lorries and police vans arrived, and the men inside ran towards the

street. We at our barricade said nothing, only too aware of the flagrant

provocation and absolute inadequacy that our solitary shotgun represented. It

was kept fully loaded, but out of sight. At that time, I would not have liked

to be the man in possession of it.

We waited at the barricade all night, listening to the sounds of the

battle only fifty yards away. As dawn came, the noise gradually lessened. We

saw the bodies of several soldiers and policemen carried away, and many more

wounded driven off in ambulances.

As the full light of day came, nearly two hundred white people, some

dressed in only their nightclothes, were escorted by the police towards a

fleet of ambulances and lorries a mile away. As they passed our barricade,

some of them tried to argue with us, but were herded on by the soldiers. While

they passed, I looked at the men on our side of the barricade and wondered

whether the hard lack of expression was also on my own face.

We waited for the activity outside to die down, but the sound of gunfire

continued spasmodically for many hours. We saw no normal traffic on the road,

and assumed that it had of necessity been diverted. One of the men at our

barricade was carrying a transistor radio, and we listened anxiously to each

of the BBC's news-bulletins hoping to hear some word of reassurance.

By ten o'clock it was apparent that events had levelled off. Most of the

police vehicles had driven away, but the army was still around us. About once

every five minutes there was a gunshot. A few houses in the next street were

still burning, but there was no sign of the fires spreading.

As soon as I could manage it I slipped away from the barricade, and

walked back to my house.

I found Isobel and Sally still sheltering under the stairs. Isobel had

withdrawn almost entirely; she had lost all her colour, the pupils of her eyes

were dilated and she slurred her speech when she spoke. Sally was no better.

Their story was a garbled and incomplete recounting of a series of events they

had experienced at second-hand: explosions, shouting voices, gunfire and the

spreading crackle of burning wood . . . all heard as they lay in the dark.

While I made them some tea and warmed up some food, I inspected the damage to

the house.

A petrol-bomb had exploded in the garden, setting fire to our shed. All

the windows at the back had been broken, and lodged in the walls I found

several bullets. Even as I stood in the back room a bullet flew through the

window and missed me by a few inches.

I crawled on my hands and knees to the window, and peered through.

Our house normally commanded a view across the intervening gardens to

the houses in the next street. As I knelt there, I saw that of them only about

a half were still intact. Through the windows of some of these I could see

several people moving. One man, a short Negro in filthy clothes, stood in the

garden sheltering behind a part of a fence. It was he who had fired his gun at

me. As I watched he fired again, this time at the house next to mine.

When Isobel and Sally had dressed, we took the three suitcases we had

packed the previous week and I put them in the car. While Isobel went through

the house and systematically locked all interconnecting doors and cupboards, I

collected our cash.

Shortly afterwards, we drove down to the barricade. Here we were stopped

by the other men.

"Where do you think you're going, Whitman?" one of them asked me. It was

Johnson, one of the men with whom I had shared a patrol three nights before.

"We're leaving," I said. "We're going to Isobel's parents." Johnson

reached in through the open window, turned off the ignition before I could

stop him, and took the key.

"Sorry," he said. "No one leaves. If we all ran out, the niggers'd be in

like a flash."

Several of the men had crowded round. By my side, I felt Isobel tense.

Sally was in the back. I didn't care to think how this may be affecting her.

"We can't stay here. Our house overlooks those others. It's only a

matter of time before they come through the gardens."

I saw several of the men glance at one another. Johnson, whose house

wasn't on the same side as ours, said stubbornly: "We've got to stick

together. It's our only hope."

Isobel leaned over me and looked up at Johnson imploringly. "Please,"

she said. "Have you thought of us? What about your own wife? Does she want to

stay?""It's only a matter of time," I said again. "You've seen the pattern in

other places. Once the Afrims have got a street to themselves, they spread

through the rest of the district in a few nights."

"But we've got the law on our side," one of the other men said, nodding

his head in the direction of the soldiers outside the barricade.

"They're not on anyone's side. You might as well pull down the

barricade. It's useless now."

Johnson moved away from the car-window and went to speak to one of the

other men. It was Nicholson, one of the leaders of the patrol committee. After

a few seconds, Nicholson himself came over.

"You're not leaving," he said finally. "No one's leaving. Get the car

away from here and come back on barricade duty. It's all we can do."

He tossed the ignition-key in, and it fell on Isobel's lap. She picked

it up. I wound the window-handle and closed the window tightly.

As I started the engine, I said to Isobel: "Do you want to chance it?"

She looked at the men in front of us, and at the barbed-wire barricade,

and at the armed soldiers beyond it. She said nothing.

Behind us, Sally was crying. "I want to go home, Daddy," she said.

I turned the car round and drove back slowly to our house. As we passed

one of the other houses on the same side of the street as our own, we heard

the sound of a woman screaming inside. I glanced at Isobel, and saw her close

her eyes.

I stopped the car by the house. It looked strangely normal. We sat in

the car and made no move to get out. I left the engine running. To turn it off

would have been too final.

After a while I put the car into forward gear ahd drove down to the end

of the street, towards the recreation-field. When the barricade had been

erected at the main-road end, only two strands of wire had been put across

here, and it was normally unmanned. So it was now. There was no one around;

like the rest of the street it was at once unnervingly normal and abnormal. I

stopped the car, jumped out and pulled down the wire. Beyond it was a wooden

fence, held in place by a row of stakes. I tried it with my hands, and found

that it was firm but not immovable.

I drove the car over the wire and stopped with the bumperbar touching

the wooden fence. In first gear I pushed the fence, until it snapped and fell.

In front of us the recreation-field was deserted. I drove across it, feeling

the car lurch in and out of the ruts of the previous year's sport.

I pulled myself out of the water and lay gasping for breath on the bank

of the river. The physical shock of the cold water had exhausted me. Every

part of my body ached and throbbed. I lay still.

Five minutes later I stood up, then looked back across the water to

where Isobel and Sally were waiting for me. I walked upstream, carrying the

end of the rope I had towed behind me, until I was directly opposite them.

Isobel was sitting on the soil of the bank, not watching me but staring

blankly downstream. By her side, Sally stood attentively.

I shouted instructions to them across the water. I saw Sally saying

something to Isobel, and Isobel shaking her head. I stood impatiently, feeling

my muscles shivering into the beginnings of cramp. I shouted again and Isobel

stood up. Sally and she tied the end of the rope around their waists and

across their chests in the manner I had shown them, then walked nervously to

the edge of the water. In my impatience I may have pulled the rope too hard.

In any event, just as they had reached the edge of the water they fell forward

and began floundering in the shallows. Isobel could not swim and was afraid of

drowning. I could see Sally struggling with her, trying to prevent her mother

from crawling back on to the bank.

Taking the initiative from both of them, I pulled the rope, towing them

out into the centre of the river. Whenever Isobel's face came above the

surface, she shouted and screamed in a mixture of fear and anger.

In just under a minute I had them on my side. Sally lay on the muddy

bank, staring at me wordlessly. I wanted her to criticize me for what I had

done, but she said nothing. Isobel lay on her side, doubled over. She retched

up water for several minutes, then swore at me. I ignored her.

Although the river was cold from the hills, the air was warm. We took

stock of our possession. Nothing had been lost in the crossing, but everything

we carried had become soaked. It had been part of the original plan that

Isobel should hold our main haversack up out of the water, while Sally

supported her. Now, all our clothes and food were wet, and our matches for

lighting a fire were unusable. We decided it would be best if we removed all

our clothes, and hung them in the bushes and trees in the hope that they would

be wearably dry by morning.

We lay together on the ground, shivering miserably, and cuddling each

other for warmth. Within half an hour Isobel was asleep, but Sally lay in my

arms with her eyes open.

We each knew the other was awake and stayed so for most of the night.

I was to spend the night with a woman named Louise. She had taken a room

for the purpose in an hotel in Goodge Street, and as I had told Isobel that I

was taking part in an all-night demonstration at the college I was able to get

away from home for a whole night.

Louise and I dined at a small Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street,

then, not wishing to spend the entire evening in her hotel room, we went to a

cinema in Tottenham Court Road. I do not recall the title of the film. All I

can remember is that it was foreign, that its dialogue was sub-titled in

English and that it concerned a violently-resolved love-affair between a

coloured man and a white woman. The film contained several scenes of complete

sexual frankness, and although it had not been banned, few cinemas were

willing to show films which depicted the various forms of the sex act in

detail because of several instances of police action. However, at the time we

saw the film it had been showing unmolested for more than a year.

Louise and I had bought seats at the rear of the cinema, and when the

police came in by way of the entrances along each side, we were able to see

the precision with which it was done, indicating that the raid had been

planned carefully. One policeman stood at each door and the others moved in a

loose cordon around the audience.

For a minute or two there seemed to be no further action, and we

continued to watch the film until the house-lights went up. The film still

showed and went on doing so for several more minutes. Finally it stopped

abruptly.

We sat in the auditorium for twenty minutes without knowing what was

happening. One of the policemen forming part of the cordon was near me and I

asked him what was going on. He made no answer.

We were ordered to leave the auditorium row by row and to divulge our

names and addresses. By a stroke of good fortune I did not have with me any

form of self-identification, and was thus unable to prove who I was. Under the

circumstances I gave the police a false name and address, and although my

pockets were searched in an attempt to find authentication for my story, I was

allowed to go free after Louise vouched for my identity.

We returned to her hotel immediately and went to bed. After the events

of the evening I was rendered impotent, and in spite of Louise's best efforts

we were unable to have intercourse.

John Tregarth's government had been in power for three months.

As adversaries we detested the Afrim troops. We continually heard

rumours of their cowardice in battle; and of their arrogance in victory,

however small or relative it may be.

One day we encountered a member of the Royal Nationalist Air Force who

had been captured by an Afrim patrol. This man, who had been a pilot until

crippled by the Africans' torture, told us of brutalities and atrocities in

their military interrogation centres that made our own experiences as

civilians appear to be trivial and perfunctory. The pilot had lost one leg

below the knee, and had suffered lacerated tendons in the other, and he

counted himself as among the more fortunate. He asked us for assistance.

We were reluctant to become involved and Lateef called a meeting to

decide what to do. In the end we voted to transport the crippled man to within

a mile of the R.N.A.F. station, and to allow him to find his own way from

there.Shortly after this incident, we were rounded up by a large Afrim patrol

and taken to one of their civilian interrogation centres.

We said nothing to them about the pilot, nor about their military

methods in general. On this occasion we made no attempt to resist arrest. For

my own part it was because I felt it might be connected in some way with the

recent abduction of the women, but on the part of the group as a whole our

lack of resistance was an outcome of the overall lethargy being experienced at

the time.

We were taken to a large building on the outskirts of one of the

Afrim-held towns, and in a large marquee in the grounds told to strip and pass

through a delousing section. This was a part of the tent which had been

partitioned off and filled with a dense steam. Coming out a few minutes later,

we were told to dress again. Our clothes lay untouched where we had left them.

We were then divided into groups of one, two or three men. I was one of

those on my own. We were taken to rooms inside the main building and

interrogated briefly. My own interrogator was a tall West African, who, in

spite of the central-heating system, wore a brown greatcoat. I had noticed on

entering the room that the two uniformed guards in the corridor had been

holding Russian rifles.

The interrogation was sketchy. Identification-papers, certificate of

state and origin and Afrim-stamped photograph shown and checked.

"Your destination, Whitman?"

"Dorchester," I said, giving him the answer we had agreed upon in the

event of arrest.

"You have relatives there?"

"Yes." I gave him the name and address of fictitious parents.

"You have a family?"

"Yes."

"But they are not with you."

"No."

"Who is the leader of your group?"

"We are self-directed."

There was a long silence while he rescrutinized my papers. After this I

was returned to the marquee where I waited with the others as the remainder of

the interrogation-sessions were completed. Then two Afrims dressed as

civilians went through our possessions. The search was superficial in the

extreme, turning up only a fork for eating that one of the men had left near

the top of his haversack. The two knives I had secreted in the lining of my

own bag went undetected.

After this search there was another long perod of waiting, until a lorry

bearing a large red cross on a white background was driven up alongside the

marquee. The agreed Red Cross hand-out to refugees had been established for

some time as being five pounds of protein, but since the Afrims had been

handling their own side of the arrangement, provisions had decreased steadily.

I received two small cans of processed meat and a packet of forty cigarettes.

Later, we were driven away from the town in three lorries and dumped in

the countryside seventeen miles from where we had been arrested. It took us

the whole of the next day and part of the day after to find the cache of

supplies we had made at the first warning that we were about to be arrested.

At no time during our involuntary visit to Afrim-occupied territory had

we seen or heard any sign or hint of the women. That night, I lay awake

despairing of seeing Sally and Isobel again.

It had been announced on the early news that the unidentified ship which

had been sailing up the English Channel for the last two days had entered the

Thames Estuary.

During the morning I followed the regular bulletins. The ship had

neither answered nor made any radio signals since first being sighted. It was

not flying any flag. A pilot cutter had gone out to it from Tilbury, but the

men had not been able to board it. From the name on her bows, the ship had

been identified as a medium-sized cargo tramp, registered in Liberia and

according to Lloyd's was at present chartered to a shipping firm in Lagos.

It happened that from twelve-thirty I was free to leave the college, and

not having any appointments or lectures in the afternoon I decided to go down

to the river. I caught a bus to Cannon Street and walked out on to London

Bridge. Several hundred other people, mainly workers from near-by offices, had

had the same notion, and the east side of the bridge was crowded.

As time passed several people moved away, evidently in order to return

to their offices, and as a result I was able to move forward to the parapet of

the bridge.

At just after two-thirty we were able to make out the ship, coming

upriver towards the Tower Bridge. We saw that there were several craft in

attendance around it, and that many of them were launches of the river police.

A wave of speculation passed through the crowd.

The ship approached the bridge, which kept its road down. A man standing

near to me had a small pair of field-glasses, and he told us that the

pedestrians on the bridge were being moved off, and the road was being closed

to traffic. A few seconds later the bridge opened just in time for the ship to

pass through.

I was aware of sirens near by. Turning, I saw that four or five

police-cars had driven on to London Bridge. The men remained inside, but left

the blue lights flashing on the roofs. The ship came on towards us.

We observed that several men on the small launches around the ship were

speaking to those on board through loud-hailers. We could not make out what

was said, but the sound came to us across the water in tinny resonances. It

became unnaturally quiet on the bridge, as the police sealed off each end to

traffic. A mounted policeman rode up and down telling us to leave the bridge.

Only a few of us obeyed.

The ship was now less than fifty yards from us, and it was possible to

see that its decks were crowded with people, many of whom were lying down. Two

of the police-launches had reached London Bridge, and were turned towards the

ship. From one of them, a policeman with a loud-hailer shouted to the captain

of the ship to stop his engines and to submit to a boarding party.

There was no acknowledgement from the ship, which sailed on slowly

towards the bridge, though many of the people on the decks of the ship were

shouting back at the police, unable to make themselves understood.

The bows of the ship passed underneath an arch of the bridge about

fifteen yards where I stood. I looked down at it. The decks were crowded to

the rails with people. I had no more time to observe their condition, because

the superstructure amidships crashed into the parapet of the bridge. It was a

slow, grinding collision, making an ugly scraping noise of metal on stone. I

saw that the paintwork of the ship and its superstructure was filthy and

rusty, with many panes of broken glass in the ports.

I looked down at the river and saw that the police-launches and two

river-authority tugs had gone in against the hull of the old ship, and were

trying to push her stern towards the concrete bank of the New Fresh Wharf. I

saw from the black smoke still issuing from her funnel and from the

white-cream froth at the stern, that the ship's engines were still running. As

the tugs made headway in pushing her towards the bank the metal superstructure

scraped and crashed repeatedly against the bridge.

I saw movement on the ship, on the decks and inside. The people on board

were moving towards the stern. Many of them fell as they ran. As the stern

rammed into the concrete quay the first men jumped ashore.

The ship was wedged firmly between the bank and the bridge, her bows

still under the arch, her superstructure against the parapet and her stern

overhanging the quay. A tug moved round to the bridge, to make sure that until

the engines were stopped the ship wouldn't turn somehow and move back into the

river. Four police-launches were now against her port side, and ropes and

rope-ladders were thrown with grappling-irons on to the decks. The fleeing

passengers made no efforts to remove them. When the first ladder was secured

the police and customs officials began to climb it.

On the bridge, our interest was directed to the people leaving the ship:

the Africans were coming ashore.

We watched them with a mixture of horror and fascination. There were

men, women and children. Most if not all were in an advanced state of

starvation. Skeletal arms and legs, distended stomachs, skull-like heads

holding staring eyes; flat, paper-like breasts on the women, accusing faces on

them all. Most were naked or nearly so. Many of the children could not walk.

Those whom no one would carry were left on the ship.

A metal door in the side of the ship was opened from within and a

gangplank pushed across the strip of water to the quay. From below-decks more

Africans came out on to the shore. Some fell to the concrete as they stepped

on the land, others moved towards the wharf-building and disappeared either

into it or around its sides. None of them looked up at us on the bridge, or

back at their fellows who were in the process of leaving the ship.

We waited and watched. There seemed to be no end to the number of people

on board.

In time, the upper decks were cleared, though people still poured ashore

from below. I tried to count the number of people lying, dead or unconscious,

on the deck. When I had reached one hundred, I stopped counting.

The men who had gone aboard finally managed to stop the engines, and the

ship was made fast to the quay. Many ambulances had arrived at the wharf, and

those people suffering most were put inside and driven away.

But hundreds more just wandered from the wharf, away from the river, and

up into the streets of the City, whose occupants knew nothing as yet of the

events on the river.

I learned later that the police and the river authorities had found more

than seven hundred corpses on the ship, most of them children. The welfare

authorities accounted for another four and a half thousand survivors, who were

taken to hospitals or emergency centres. There was no way of counting the

remainder, though I heard once an estimate of three thousand people who had

wandered away from the ship and tried to survive alone.

Shortly after the ship had been secured, we were moved off the bridge by

the police, who told us that its structure was considered to be unsafe. The

following day, however, it was open again to traffic.

The event I had witnessed became known in time as the first of the Afrim

landings.

We were signalled down by a prowling police-car and questioned at some

length as to our destination, and the circumstances surrounding our departure.

Isobel tried to explain about the invasion of the next street and the imminent

danger in which our home had been.

While we waited for permission to continue, Sally tried to soothe

Isobel, who was taken by a flood of tears. I did not want to be affected by

it. While being in full sympathy with her feelings, and realizing that it is

no small upset to be dispossessed in such a manner, I had experienced Isobel's

lack of fortitude for the last few months. It had been understandably awkward

while I was working at the cloth factory, but in comparison with some of my

other former colleagues at the college, our situation was relatively settled.

I had made every attempt to be sympathetic and patient with her, but had

succeeded only in reviving old differences.

In a few moments the policeman returned to our car and informed us that

we could proceed, on condition we headed for the U.N. camp at Horsenden Hill

in Middlesex. Our original destination had been Isobel's parents, who now

lived in Bristol.

The policeman told us that civilians were not advised to make

long-distance journeys across country after dark. We had spent a large part of

the afternoon cruising about the London suburbs in an attempx to find a garage

that would sell us enough petrol to fill not only the tank of the car, but

also the three five-gallon cans I carried in the boot, and consequently it was

now beginning to get dark. All three of us were hungry.

I drove along the Western Avenue towards Alperton, after having made a

wide detour through Kensington, Fulham and Hammers mith to avoid the

barricaded Afrim enclaves at Notting Hill and North Kensington. The main road

itself was clear of obstructions, though we saw that every side-road and one

or two of the subsidiary main-roads that crossed it at intervals were

barricaded and manned by armed civilians. At Hanger Lane we turned off the

Western Avenue and up through Alperton, along the route we had been directed.

At several points we saw parked police vehicles, several dozen uniformed

police and many U.N. militiamen.

At the gates of the camp we were again detained and interrogated, but

this was only to be expected. In particular, we were questioned closely about

the reasons we had left our home, and what precautions had been made to

protect it while we were away.

I told them that the street in which we lived had been barricaded, that

we had closed and locked every door in the house, for which we had keys, and

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DARKENINGISLANDbyChristopherPriestFlyleaf:WarhasdevastatedtheAfricancontinent.Millionsofhomeless,hungryrefugeeshavefledtootherlands.InEngland,asmoreandmoreAfricansarriveandsetupcommunities,normallifesoonbeginstodisintegrate,withtheentirepopulationirrevocablyfactionalizedintotheAfrimsandtheirsupporte...

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Christopher Priest - Darkening Island

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