To See the Light Return Read online

  dedication and disclaimer

  Dedicated to the most patient man I know, my partner Gifford, and to the memory of my mother, Frances, with all my love.

  *

  This is a work of fiction. The only things in it that are true are the bunker, Brexit and climate change. Any similarity to people or places is entirely coincidental. Any factual inaccuracies are entirely my fault.

  prologue

  I blame the Queen. If she hadn’t died, if she’d clung on and outlived her son, or bypassed him in the succession and passed the crown to the more tractable William, Charles wouldn’t have been crowned King. He wouldn’t have confirmed himself as an autocratic and eccentric despot in the minds of the British public, and the old-school farmers of Devon wouldn’t have rebelled against him using his status ­­­– as both monarch and landowner – to push Parliament towards converting all agriculture to organic standards. He might as well have been trying to enforce Satanic Masses for the uproar it caused among a farming community still reeling from the trauma and divisions of Brexit.

  I also blame UKIP, declaring they spoke for all despite imploding as a national political party once the odious Farago departed. If they hadn’t stoked up trouble from their HQ in Torbay, whispering rebellion in the ears of our County and District Councillors – a lot of them farmers struggling to adapt to climate change and a public persuaded away from the mainstays of Devon agriculture, meat and dairy – it could all have blown over and reached a compromise that would have benefitted everyone. But no, both sides in the argument dug in and became increasingly entrenched and bitter.

  What sounded like a joke, co-opting local passport and ‘Republic of Devon’ campaigns begun by Remainers, became an actual thing – Devolution for Devon, Take Back Our Land, Make Devon Great Again – with a referendum bought and paid for by UKIP and modelled on the secession of Cataluña from Spain. Cornwall and Scotland had been talking the talk for decades but stood back and watched as we went and took the plunge.

  Despite the confident rhetoric of the campaign claims, and the warnings of recent history, it turned out the Devolvers had no plan for how to structure our governanace once we had seceded. We continued to be run by elected Councils, so one could argue we are effectively a Republic, but scratch any one of the Councillors, or our successive Mayors, and I think you’d find a Royalist not far beneath the surface. That is our abiding problem – there was no real shifting of power to the people. I wouldn’t be surprised if our latest incumbent saw himself as a defacto King rather than a civic dignitary. He certainly likes to wear his chains of office at every opportunity; if a crown and sceptre were to be proposed, I do not think he would refuse them.

  It was hard to see the difference at first, once Devolution was ‘won’. The real changes came after Westminster pulled the army and navy bases out, and we lost the jobs and supply chains they sustained. Militia were called up from the local populace – and I mean local, because thousands of the people who had flocked here to live in our ugly new housing developments left before the ink was dry on Devon’s Declaration of Independence and Secession – but there was no money to pay them. The unemployed were drafted – and there were many of those, myself included, because there were very few jobs left with fewer retirees to service. Any that stayed were too skint to leave and therefore too skint to pay for lattes, colonics and home care. There was a mass die-off within the first three years because public services fell apart.

  Militia – armed with weapons traded illegally by the more enterprising of the departing army personnel – began patrolling our borders, looking for people entering or leaving without paying the tolls. Identifiable by their black uniforms, with a patch on the chest denoting the Devon flag (a black-bordered white cross on a green field the colour of mould), tales of abuses of power, both within their ranks and towards the populace, were rife but whispered.

  I managed to escape the draft, being a lesbian and thus undesirable in public service; sexual freedoms were one of the first things to go. My wife and I had to stop expressing affection in public, had to pretend just to be housemates and hide our wedding bands.

  Roads were blocked and began to deteriorate without central funding. Train services were axed, because we couldn’t afford to maintain the tracks, or come to an agreement with the national network. Electricity supplies became erratic, because the National Grid wasn’t allowed to maintain our part of the network without paying outrageous fees for the privilege. Solar panels were raided from solar farms and abandoned homes, by organised gangs from Somerset, or stolen from houses as their occupants slept. Everything broke, and stayed broken, because most of the expertise had left and there were no spare parts.

  Our water and sewage systems broke down, abandoned by private companies with an eye on their bottom line rather than ours.

  After that life became – literally – shit.

  From the memoirs of Mrs Prendaghast

  in case the sun

  For almost an hour, nothing passed him but the high summer sun, angling its beams through the laurel but casting little heat in this dark recess of overgrown woodland. Then two women walked by on foot, and ten minutes later a man with a heavily laden donkey, all pedlars headed away from the village’s weekly market, picking their way carefully across deep ruts, crusts of manure and lumps of old asphalt. By then the high humidity had soaked Will’s clothing, his knees were aching, and sharp bramble barbs were digging into his skin even through the tough weave of his trousers. He was shifting position, taking care to keep his head low, when he heard the approach of an engine, hacking and coughing its way up the steep incline. Aches forgotten, he hunched back down and drew a battered notebook and a stubby pencil out of the rucksack by his side.

  Finding a blank space at the end of his notes, he peered through a screen of laurel and watched the car, a beat-up old Audi, come around the corner below his hiding place. Will scribbled the model of car in his notebook and squinted at the number plate, struggling to make it out through the mud; he could only note the first three digits. It would be below him any moment, the engine straining as the driver changed gears.

  The driver’s face was hidden by smears of mud and bird shit on the windscreen; it was a wonder they could see well enough to steer. Will picked up a handful of dirt and threw it over the edge of the bank so it scattered across the car’s bonnet. The car lurched as the driver reacted, the pale blur behind the glass twitching towards Will's hiding place just long enough to be recognised.

  Mayor Spight himself. Will wrote down the name in his careful print. No passengers. The Audi continued its way up the hill, vomiting black smoke out of the rattling exhaust pipe. It stank of burned bacon.

  Will relaxed and settled back against a tree stump, preparing to wait and log Spight’s return. A sharp pain on his neck told him a horsefly had found a way through his protective scarf and was feasting on his blood. He slapped at it and the small body fell into his lap. He checked to be sure he had killed it.

  A robin alighted nearby and cocked its head, watching him through a black and beady eye. Will threw the small corpse towards it and the robin accepted the offering, snatching it up and flying away. The sun disappeared behind thick grey cloud and rain began to fall, drops finding their way through the dense canopy and splashing on to his head. Will pulled his jacket tight around his skinny frame. It promised to be a long and chilly afternoon.

  *

  Dorcas staggered through the door with another heaped basin and slapped it down on the tray table beside the bed, the weight of its descent toppling her centre of gravity. She half-fell, half-slid into a chair and mopped at her forehead with her sleeve. In her bed on the other side of the tiny room, Alise was already
wolfing down the contents of her own over-sized bowl, humming happily to herself.

  Primrose eyed the food and farted. It was barely audible and failed to ease her cramped digestion. She didn’t blush. She was long past blushing.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking, I’ve only just finished breakfast!’

  ‘Too bad, got to make your quota and you’ve only a couple more days to go.’

  Wearily, Primrose heaved herself up on her elbows and tried to get comfortable, pulling limply at pillows.

  ‘Hear, you let me do that, you concentrate on them calories.’ Dorcas shoved her forward, or as far forward as her belly would allow, and fussed with the pillows. Once she was satisfied they were flumped enough, Primrose was pushed back and the tray table wheeled over her lap. ‘Now girl, you get stuck in.’

  Primrose sighed, picked up the fork and stared glumly at the pile of glistening off-cuts from pork chops, bacon fat, remnants from slices of white bread, burger chunks, bits of pasta and left-over curry that filled the basin. Cunningly hidden were a few of the things Dorcas knew she loved; roast potatoes, sausages, nubs of cheese.

  Dorcas saw her expression and wheedled, ‘Get that lot down and I’ll bring you some chocolate with your bedtime pudding and hot milk.’

  Chocolate. Creamy, sweet, melting chocolate.

  Primrose shovelled a bit of pork fat onto her fork and into her mouth. Dorcas poured out a drink from the bottle on the bedside table and handed it to her. Sweet fizz bubbled up and made everything taste the same.

  On the other side of the room, Alise belched.

  ‘What about when one of them dies?’

  ‘Ever heard of foie gras?’ Primrose could almost hear Dorcas’s sly wink. ‘It’ll go down a storm across the water.’ Shrieks of laughter met this remark, and cries of, ‘You are terrible.’

  A shudder rippled slowly across her body and made the old bedsprings creak. They thought she couldn’t hear them joking, Dorcas and Ivy, the new girl taken on to help look after them, folding sheets in the corridor outside the room. Or – and the thought made Primrose sweat more than the food she was failing to digest or the humid air in the room – they knew and didn’t care. Who cares if the livestock can hear the farmer whetting the knife?

  Well, she cared.

  It hadn’t been like this when she first came to the farm. She was more mobile then and wouldn’t have stood for it. Now standing for anything had become a struggle and she had to lie down all the time, rolled from side to side to have her sores treated. On a good day. If Dorcas was busy she forgot, and Primrose was left in a peculiar state of numb agony from the places where her arse and back rubbed against rough sheets.

  When she first arrived, she was served actual meals, served up as separate courses, on different plates, like in some fancy hotel from an old magazine. But as demand grew and Dorcas took on more ‘guests’, she started to complain about all the washing up, and began serving their food in basins, then the larger washing up bowls, everything thrown in together like swill. On days Primrose really couldn’t eat any more, when her system backed up and she vomited helplessly over herself and the bedclothes, Dorcas screamed about the mess, but mostly about the waste of good food, threatening that she should make her eat it again. If Primrose cried, Dorcas said she should let her starve, her family as well. Once she calmed down, she brought extra helpings of gritty ice cream to soothe Primrose’s throat, patted her on the head.

  That night, after Alise finished masturbating and lay snoring and grunting in her sleep, Primrose had violent spasms of indigestion. She cried out for Dorcas, who was either out or downstairs in the kitchen with the CD player on, or just pretending she couldn’t hear. Primrose had heard Dorcas through the door, complaining about it, so she knew some of the others would let go in the bed sometimes, the effort of getting to the bathroom or onto a pot just too much for them. I’m not quite there yet, thought Primrose, I can’t lie here and shit myself.

  She peered over the side of the bed, leaning as far as she dared without tipping out, but couldn’t see the pot. Agnes or Ivy hadn’t brought it back. She would have to go to the bathroom, three doors down.

  It had been over a week since she left her room, and the last time she got properly out of bed was to sit in the chair while Dorcas stripped the sheets and sprayed the mattress with disinfectant: ‘Just in case.’ For a moment, remembering that, the girl felt like shitting herself just to spite the old cow; a flood of anger gave her the energy to move, slow and lumbering, inching across the mattress to the side of the bed and heaving herself over it, onto feet and knees and hips that protested at the strain.

  After putting in a handful of sawdust and replacing the lid over the stinking contents of the communal bucket, Primrose shuffled back out into the corridor in her worn slippers, and along to the head of the stairs. The house was silent, not even a sound from the kitchen where the night nurses – guards really – could usually be heard complaining about their luck at cards as Dorcas quietly and expertly stacked the deck.

  It wasn’t until Primrose was making her slow way back to bed that the thought occurred to her, a thought that had tried to surface before, that fear had pushed down before it could emerge fully. She didn’t have to stay here. Some of the others had signed contracts but she had been too young when she first arrived, and Dorcas had neglected the paperwork when she turned sixteen; legally, Primrose could leave. She stood at the top of the stairs, let the idea take shape.

  It was terrifying. What would she do then? Where could she go? Her parents wouldn’t take her back, they would return her to Dorcas for the sake of their weekly stipend and their pride in doing their bit. She wobbled, literally, and had to hang on to the banister for support.

  But she hated it here. Not just the force feeding and farming, but the boredom, the lack of privacy. The loneliness, the discomfort; the knowledge there would never be anything else other than maybe a new book or magazine for her to read. An ex-librarian, reading was about the only occupation Dorcas encouraged besides jigsaw puzzles or cards, reasoning that it was unlikely to consume too many calories. Her library had been the last in Devon, closing when Dorcas became farm Matron. Most others shut down before Devolution, victim of austerity cuts according to her old teacher, Mrs Prendaghast. Just another thing from history to Primrose’s generation; another thing they couldn’t have.

  Much of what she read mystified her, particularly the pre-Devolution magazines. The ‘real-life’ stories were so shocking; lurid and violent. Was that really how people behaved back then? And the apparently famous people in the pictures looked so odd: both sexes with shiny faces that looked like they had been inflated, the women with skinny bodies and huge boobs or bottoms. Or they were fat, like her, in which case they were ashamed, or ‘fighting the flab’, or ridiculed for not being ashamed.

  Which made Primrose feel really bad, like she should feel guilty about her weight, though she had no control over it. She realised not much had changed. The staff, the occasional visitors, all looked at her like there was something wrong with her.

  It could be like that, out there, if she left. Should she take the chance?

  If she stood here much longer she would either unnerve herself completely, or else a night guard would come and bully her back to bed. Once there it would be too hard to climb out again and she would stay, getting fatter and fatter until she couldn’t move if she wanted to. One day they would cart her out on a stretcher that would need six men to carry it, for disposal, like she’d seen happen before.

  She had to go now, while she almost had the nerve. There was no point going back to her room to get anything, she’d worn nothing but voluminous gowns or nightdresses for years, and luckily today was a nightdress day so at least her bum wouldn’t be hanging out of a hospital gown. She’d just have to hope her slippers would hold up, and her fat would keep her insulated if it was cold tonight.

  Gripping the banister, she carefully lowered herself onto the next step, then one more, making it do
wn to the ground floor in only a few minutes, her heart palpitating so her breath came high and thready and she had to rest at the bottom. Now there was only the hallway and the front door between her and freedom.

  For one horrible moment, she thought the front door was locked, but after a moment’s panic she realised it was bolted. The bolt was high up and she had to lean her bulk against the door to slide it open but she managed it quietly and there was no sound from the kitchen to show anyone had noticed anything.

  Outside the air was damp but not too cold. After the stuffiness of her room and the house, its freshness was shocking. There was no moon and plenty of cloud, and no one to see her as she made her slow way down the stone steps, where she was soon screened from the house by a dense laurel hedge flanking the drive. She had no firm plan or direction in mind. It was so long since she had left the house her memories of the village of Bodingleigh were fragmented, but she had grown up knowing where the fat farm was – everyone knew – and had a rough idea of how to find the school and the schoolhouse next door. Mrs Prendaghast had always been kind to her; Primrose hoped she might take her in.

  The surface of the drive was pitted, eroded by decades of heavy rain channelling itself down the hill, but the road beyond was worse and her progress slowed even more as she struggled to keep her balance on the ruts. Her slippers kept coming off and it was an effort to stoop and pull them out of clods of mud, then slip them back on her sore feet. She was sweating and breathing hard even though she was going downhill, and the dark and quiet were so unfamiliar, after all these years of being indoors, that she was terrified.

  It began to rain, pattering drops giving way to a steady downpour; soon her nightdress was plastered to her and she was shivering.

  For half an hour, she had no company but the trees – whispering overhead as the breeze built up – and the occasional scuttling of something small fleeing from her, making her jump. But she kept going, gritting her teeth against the pain in her joints and chafing of her thighs, her wet nightdress clinging to her shins and making it even harder for her to walk. She lost her slippers in the dark and was too miserable to go back to look for them.