Before the Ruins: A Novel

CHAPTER 1

GAME

The year Peter went missing was the year of the floods. I was on my way home from a meeting in Paris when the call came. It was a Wednesday, late April, and as the train hurtled toward London night was coming on. The heavy clouds were darkest blue and great pools of water lay in the fields like molten silver. I was on my laptop, reading about the latest in a series of leaked financial papers. When I glanced up, the last light slipped away, and my reflection coalesced upon the window as though the darkness was developing fluid.

My phone rang and I rooted violently for it in my handbag, alive with panic, as though I was secretly, desperately hoping for a momentous and life-changing call from someone who would ring only once and withhold their number. In my wildest dreams, I would not have guessed Peter’s mother would be the caller.

Andrea … are you there? It’s Patricia, Mrs. White. When I didn’t answer, she went on, Is that you, Andy? Is it you?

Yes, it’s me. How are you? Had the vicar died? A quick, stabbing pain, deeper than I would have expected.

We’re both well, dear. You sound … a bit different. Thinking about it later, I would realize she meant posher. Peter says you’re doing very well.

Her voice was trembly. She had always been old, even when we were small. Her eyes were a pale china blue. When I used to knock at the vicarage door, her mouth would purse in disappointment as though she’d been expecting a boy, not a girl, but a nice boy called Rufus or Hugo from a nice home. But there I was with my crew cut and pink plastic earrings, smiling the gap-toothed smile of a master criminal and inviting Peter to throw sticks in the stream, by which I meant trapping a slowworm and posting it through Mrs. East’s letterbox because I’d heard my mother call her a witch. We were always up to something or other. I had a weakness for games, a trait I shared with Peter.

It’s Peter, dear, I’m worried about him. We haven’t heard from him. Not this past month. Have you spoken to him?

I’m afraid I haven’t, Mrs. White. I imagined her standing in the vicarage front room, staring out toward the yew hedge, the vicar beside her with a crocheted blanket draped over his knees. It seemed wrong, talking to her on an iPhone. She came from a generation that knew rationing and hand-cranked their cars and had uncles who’d died in the trenches. A time of myth, it seemed now, like that of Arthur and his knights.

It’s been four Sundays now. He always calls us on Sundays after Evensong. I’ve tried calling him but I just get the recording.

I hesitated. My instinct was to cover for him, only I didn’t know what I was covering for. It had been my birthday, my thirty-eighth, the previous week. Usually Peter remembered and sent a text, but not this time.

I don’t see Peter very often. We sort of move in different circles. And work is always so busy. I mean mine and Peter’s. Have you tried calling him there? Or his other friends?

He told us he changed jobs. I thought I wrote the name of the company down but I can’t find it. It was a foreign name, or names, a sort of string of foreign names. And he hasn’t brought anyone home in … well, in quite a while.

No, it was unlikely that Peter would have brought anyone home.

You were always such good friends. You and Peter. And Marcus and Emma, of course. But you and Peter were friends first. I know he always thought of you as his best friend, even after, she paused, everything that happened.

Everything that happened. Peter had wanted to talk about it at the wedding, the wedding I invited him to and after which he’d disappeared, if only from Patricia.

Have you tried googling him, I mean for his work number?

Googling…? No, I was hoping … you will look into it for me, Andy? You’ll find out what he’s up to, won’t you?

After we hung up, I stared out the window. The train carriage was quiet. We raced past a string of streetlamps on an overpass, lights blurring so the night was stitched with golden thread. I wondered why I’d agreed. It might have been her calling me Andy. For well over a decade, Peter’s mother was pretty much the only person to call me by my full name. But I have been Andrea, or frequently Ms. Carter, for many years now.

Then there was the fact that she had always loved Peter, fervently, protectively; when he was sixteen she was still cutting the crusts off his crab paste sandwiches, unaware that he’d been throwing them to the jackdaws in the graveyard since he was seven and buying chocolate bars for lunch with money he’d come by via the vicar’s trouser pockets. Yes, Patricia loved Peter, and yet I don’t know if she ever really knew him. She and the vicar had had some fairly clear ideas about who he should be, and in the end I think he consented to play pretend with them, to give them what they wanted, which meant, I suppose, that he loved them too.

At King’s Cross I made my way underground. There, the walls were papered with moving, glowing dreams. Descending on the escalators to the Victoria Line, I found myself thinking that if ads were really dreams, the preoccupations of the unconscious, then all we wanted to be was sexy. Because they all said sexy—the women coy, or inviting, or half-naked, the men white of tooth and thick of mane—so that must be what we were buying. Not good, or kind, or honorable, the qualities the vicar had once struggled to impress on us, just sexy.

I forced myself to march the few streets home, wondering how quickly I could get into bed and fall asleep. I was always tired at that time. Doing my job, sleep came at a premium, but even when I did get a chance to catch up, it was a tiredness that sleep could not cure. If I had divided myself into parts—body, brain, heart, soul—I would have been unable to tell you which bit precisely was so exhausted.

Once home, I didn’t immediately go to bed. Instead, I fussed about the flat, making tiny adjustments to things, passing a duster over the surfaces, even though the cleaner had been the day before. The fretfulness in Patricia’s voice had got to me. I wondered what Peter was playing at, which made me think of the wedding, of the last time I had seen Peter. He had wanted to talk about the manor, but I had closed him down.

As I laid out my clothes for the next day, I had no inkling that, in light of Peter’s disappearance, the manor and everything that happened there was a subject that was going to be thoroughly reopened. That in pursuit of Peter, I would see and speak to them all again except, of course, for the one who could no longer speak to anyone.

Slipping between the sheets, I checked my emails and scrolled through the news one last time, then turned out the light. In the darkness, I lay listening to the quiet street and distant sirens. In London, no matter where you live there are always sirens at night. I thought of the scenes the police were being called to, the people being raced to the hospital in the backs of ambulances. I thought of all the games no longer being played. Of all the games gone wrong.

All of which should have meant bad dreams, or at least unsettled ones, but in fact my dream was quite the opposite, although in a way that was worse, since waking from it was so painful. I don’t remember all of it, of course, was left only with a few images and a feeling: my bare feet ankle-deep in the wet emerald lawn, the sun falling just so on the manor, and to the left the lake where the wind stirred the reeds and the little white temple cast its dark shadow on the ripples. The whole afternoon lay ahead, spectral in its perfection. The sky would stay its clear, glassy blue, the shadows would creep feline over the grass, and then as the sun sank, the stone of the place would begin to exhale the heat of the whole long day. And in my dream, I knew exactly which day it was. I knew that today was the day of the apocalypse, today was June 20, 1996, the day the four of us first went to the manor, the day we met David. Just before we found out about the diamonds.

CHAPTER 2

APOCALYPSE I

It was May when my mother came home and, collapsed upon the hall carpet, her face all concertinaed on one side, announced the coming of the apocalypse. It was coming, it was coming soon, and none of us would survive it.

June twentieth, she said, 1996, and then she passed out. I rolled her onto her side and pulled down her wrinkled skirt, breathing in vodka fumes and the smell of her unwashed hair. She opened her eyes, blinking sleepily like a kitten, and lashed out, her fist connecting with my jaw. I swore and backed off to a safe distance. Then I went to the kitchen, put a bag of frozen peas on it, and waited for the murder to seep out of my heart. It’d been a while since she had caught me.

It’s coming! You’re going to die too!

I went over and slammed the kitchen door, sealing her off. I hadn’t spoken to her properly in months. After a couple of minutes, I heard her shuffling into the living room where she slept these days, partly because she kept falling down the stairs, partly because it was as far away from me as she could get.

The door clicked shut. The radio came on. I swapped the peas for a bag of fish sticks, reaching deep into the frost-encrusted maw of the freezer compartment and hauling them out in a shower of ice.

Ultimately, she was right though. Not about Armageddon, but about a coming end.

It became a thing, the apocalypse. Like lines from films we watched together, the in-jokes we curated, and the impressions we all did, even Peter, of Peter’s father.

So Mum says the world is ending on June twentieth. Nothing my mother said or did surprised them, and the hash we smoked, sat in the back of Marcus’s uncle’s van parked up at the castle or in a quiet spot in one of the lanes, meant our reactions were often muted and slow to load—although at the time the comparison would have conjured Atari computer games, rather than YouTube videos or Facebook Live. Porn was still a dirty magazine passed around class. We saved up for CDs and taped songs off the radio. I didn’t have a TV because my mother wouldn’t pay the license fee, so news came from skimming week-old copies of The Sun or The Evening Adver in Darren’s office.

Outside the van, the hedgerows were clouded with cow parsley and hogweed. Peter, Em, and I were eighteen. Marcus, my boyfriend, was nineteen. I was sitting wedged under Marcus’s arm with a toolbox sticking into my back. His other hand held the ashtray, an empty paper coffee cup, and rested lightly on my thigh. Sometimes I wished we could stay in the van forever. I couldn’t remember meeting any of them. We had gone to the same schools, right from when we were five, all the way through. We had a common language and a shared reference library of teachers, landmarks, and local legends. It was as if they had always been on the edges of my vision: Peter in a stripy scarf, aged six, hopping across the playground; Em arriving at junior school each day with a red teapot slung over her shoulder on a string; Marcus, a good-looking boy in the year above, endlessly chasing a football across a field. While we had always known him—because everyone knew everyone, because of who his uncle was—Marcus had been the last to join our tight-knit group. He had left school at sixteen but come back in to retake his English GCSE on his Uncle Darren’s orders. There had been an empty chair next to Peter and Marcus took it, and at lunchtime trailed after him, looking awkward and asking questions about King Lear, and then about what we might all be doing later on or at the weekend, and scowling at anyone else who came near us. I was tempted to tell him to get lost, but Em said, He’s all right, Andy. I mean, he’s not doing any harm. Until suddenly we were four. And four was enough for me. Four was plenty.

So no exam results then? Em was sitting beside Peter on a rolled-up bit of carpet; Em kneeling, her fringe over her eyes, Peter—all ankle, knee, and elbow—with his long skinny legs drawn up under his chin.

No Oxford?

No, Peter, I said. After the apocalypse there will be no Oxford. No more school of any kind.

And Reading? Marcus had his eye on a ticket to the festival.

Canceled due to the sun turning black and the heavens being rolled back like a scroll.

Peter reached in and plucked the joint from my fingertips. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, he intoned. Sometimes it was almost like having the vicar in the van with us.

But if the apocalypse is coming, I went on, we can do exactly what we want, and only what we want. Until June twentieth, that is.

People had been talking to us about the future ever since we could remember, particularly in Peter’s case, of whom great things were expected. The idea of deleting it, and ending its hold over us, was worth exploring. In the van, wreathed in smoke, nostrils filled with the smell of grease and oil and the tang of hash, we talked about what we’d do. Who would die painfully. What we’d steal. The things we’d try, mostly things we’d seen people do on TV that were supposed to be fun. There was an edge of hysteria to our laughter. Em had to scramble out, bent over at ninety degrees, and pee behind one of the back wheels, getting thistled in the arse in the process.

They would have let it drop, however, had it not been for me. The apocalypse called out to something lodged under my skin, the longing for destruction perhaps, for erasure—of everything, of everyone, especially myself.

We dropped off Peter at the vicarage and Em at her family’s cottage on the Hungerford road, and then Marcus and I drove into the Savernake Forest, ancient woodland where Henry VIII had once hunted, home to deer, walkers, and courting couples, site of murders, and rumored wandering place of a headless horsewoman. We parked the van and walked out to the Big Bellied Oak, climbing up till we reached a seat among its thousand-year-old branches. A little starlight crept through the new leaves. I thought of dead stars, dead events, all their rage consumed millions of years ago, just a memory of fire reaching out across the universe, and for the first time since the punch I felt better, more normal, and not like my hands were twitching to strangle someone.

You all right?

I nodded. Marcus had a chivalrous streak. He was protective. Only a month ago, he’d sent Greg Martin sprawling for trying to put his arm around me. But my mum was a woman, and by Marcus’s code you never hit women, never lifted a finger against them. His uncle said men who did that were no better than dogs. Still, better not to say anything.

Just stoned, I said.

Me too. With one arm gripping a branch, Marcus leaned in to kiss me. His mouth was warm and tasted, not unpleasantly, of cigarettes.

We’d been going out a year, since I’d heard rumors of a girl out at Bishopstone who liked him. It wasn’t just the prospect of losing the lifts, or my Saturday job at his uncle’s office, or the fact that with Marcus around no one dared give Peter any trouble, not in the roughest of pubs. I liked Marcus, although it was sometimes hard, with all the other stuff in the balance, to know how much.

He drew back and let out a quick breath. If I close my eyes, I feel like I’m falling. He wrapped both arms around the branch and glanced downward. Oh, that’s weird.

You’ve got the fear.

A bit. It’ll pass. Hey, what are you doing?

What I was doing was unbuttoning his Levi’s. One of his legs began to tremble slightly, dancing in the air. I wondered what it would take for Marcus not to respond to my hands—more than the prospect of a thirty-foot drop, it seemed.

Something was rustling about in the undergrowth over to the left. The moon was peeping. I liked having him where I wanted him. I liked the fact that like this, he could not touch me back, so I did it slow. Before he came, he said my name, quickly, with a furrowed brow, like I troubled him, like I pained him. I wiped my hand off on my jeans.

I think you hit the headless horsewoman. But part of my brain was thinking, Well, that’s that done for a while.

Later, in bed, floating on a little hash cloud, I thought of the world after the apocalypse. I saw Marlborough empty of people, its supermarkets abandoned, its shops looted. I imagined packs of dogs marauding up the high street, and the great stone fountains of its famous college dry and full of leaves. At our own school, Saint John’s, our work peeled from its sugar-paper mounting on the display boards, and in the canteen, the linoleum shrank and cracked, and the enormous saucepans rusted where they hung on the kitchen walls.

It made me feel something, something shimmery, like the times in the church, years before, when I would hang over one of the creaking pews till my hair touched the flagstones and Peter would ring one of the hand bells right next to my ear. Even after the sound had faded and my ears had stopped ringing, something in my brain would go on resounding, as though deep inside me a tiny cliff was shearing off into the sea, a tower block collapsing soundlessly.

So I kept bringing us back to it, asking Marcus and Peter and Em again and again what they would want to do if they had one more day, just one more day.

On June 20, dawn broke the color of Mrs. East’s roses. After much consideration, I’d decided not to kill my mother. Instead, I made myself pancakes for breakfast. I put all the golden syrup I wanted on them, which turned out to be all the golden syrup there was. Then I licked the plate.

The lane into town was narrow and windy. When cars came along, I waited on the verge and then wandered out again to the middle of the road where it was sunny. The woods exhaled cool air. At some point I started jogging, and then the jog became a sprint, just for the hell of it, in and out of the sunlight and the dappled shadows on the road, until I was winded, and slowed, panting, to a lope.

A tractor was haymaking in a field. I passed the rugby club, and then the corner of the common where the circus tents of the Mop would set up every autumn, and where certain girls would sit near on the grass banks in summer, waiting for cars to pull up and take them out to some quiet spot in the Savernake and—almost always—bring them back.

When I got to Marlborough I went to the bank, and since it was the last day on earth, I took out every penny I had, which added up to nineteen pounds and seventy-eight pence.

The manor lay empty, with a chain and padlock on the gate and signs that said the property was patrolled by guard dogs. It wasn’t. Men working for Marcus’s uncle Darren had put the signs up a few years back, when the family who owned it got into trouble with inheritance taxes and had put it on the market. It had sold, a year or so ago, but there was still no sign of the new owners. A couple of times squatters had gotten in, but Marcus’s uncle had ways of dealing with unwanted visitors, involving his Alsatians, Arnie and Sly; balaclavas; and a couple of his bricklayer friends. Last time, he let them leave with what they could carry, burnt the rest of their stuff, and gave Marcus the thumb-sized piece of hash he’d taken from them.

As we came down the hill along the A436, from the van’s passenger seat I could see the manor’s shingle roof and then, for a split second, I was allowed a glimpse of its lovely face before it was swallowed by the line of firs that stood along the front boundary, shielding it from the road. On the double-decker to Swindon, from the top deck, you could keep it in view for a few more seconds, and on school trips, or the annual Christmas excursion to see a show at the theater, I had always looked out for it, greeted it as a secret friend, like the mysterious, bowing blue-robed figure in the east window of the church.

Marcus parked the van in front of the gate and we climbed over quickly and moved up the driveway, out of sight of the road. There were weeds growing up through the gravel and the lawn was knee-high in wild barley and thistles. As we drew nearer and the sound of the cars—already muted by the firs—diminished, I became aware of the murmur of bees in the grass. I suppose there were crickets and hornets and wasps as well, but what I remember was that heavy, satisfied sound that bees make. The brick had weathered to a darkish pink, and each one was surrounded by a rime of white mortar. With the morning sun upon it, it made my heart quicken.

We stopped a few feet away from the front door and dropped our bags on the stone steps. Peter peered in the windows and as I bent over to untie my laces, I heard him bang the knocker against the door, and the sound echoed through the empty building. Marcus was standing with his hands in his pockets, gazing upward.

The manor was three stories high. On either side, set back a little, and a story shorter, were wings. The roof was shingle, the facade brick, and around the mullioned windows, the builders had incorporated seams of local flint. Further on, if you followed the drive round, were stables and a clutch of outbuildings.

Are you going to take that side?

With his chin, Marcus indicated left. That way, the climb was fairly easy owing to a chimneypiece edged in sticking-out brickwork, and nearer the top, a string course, a line of bricks that stuck out edge-ward from the wall.

No other route was immediately obvious, but I knew that Marcus had found one, and that it was hard, which was why he was nudging me toward the easier climb. Every way I looked, the eaves were the problem. Then I caught Marcus cast a quick look right and, following his gaze, I saw in the shaded corner where the wing met the main house, there was a tree. Tiny green-and-brown dappled pears hung from its branches and, while it barely reached to the first-floor windows, coming halfway down the wall was a piece of drainpipe, and above that a series of jutting cornerstones.

I went to stand beneath it with Marcus at my heels.

I’ll take the tree and the pipe. You take the chimney, I said.

You sure?

The world ends today.

Right. I wasn’t going to be told what I could and could not climb and Marcus was smart enough to know it. Besides, it was one of the things he liked about me. His mum, Darren’s sister, was a bag of nerves, forever calling up Marcus or Darren and asking them to drop whatever they were doing because she thought she smelled gas or the fridge was making a funny noise.

I’ll watch you.

Peter can do it. I’ll meet you at the top.

He looked at the route up and poked the toe of his trainers into the ground. The lawn at the base of the tree was soft and springy, but even so.

You fall, Andy, you’re fucked.

Think so? Our smiles met. Peter, hearing his name, ambled over, a finger thrust between the pages of a book to guard his place.

There’s a piano inside.

Em was sitting on the lawn and had taken out her sketchbook. She lifted her skirt so the sun could get to her legs, her gaze settled upon the fountain and its stone cherubs, and she sighed contentedly.

I stepped into Marcus’s cupped hands, swung up into the pear tree, and a couple of birds shot skyward. Following the trunk, I hauled myself up and then, as I got higher, shifted my weight so that the tree bent over toward the wall of the house. As it did so, I pushed off with my feet and caught hold of the drainpipe. It was easy and within a few seconds, I had shinnied up and got my hands around the first of the cornerstones. There was a breeze higher up. A little winged creature, a beetle with petrol-blue iridescent wings, landed on my forearm. I got my feet right up under me and grasped for the next cornerstone and then the next, feeling the oil from my palms seeping into the