Monopoly

Monopoly



When he woke up his father was dead.



Completely drained of colour, he lay next to him on the bed they had made from a door that had been gathering dust in the far corner of their cellar. His father had instructed the boy to fetch bricks from the yard and bring them down, one by one, so that he could prop his makeshift bed up against the dry section of wall at the far end. The boy had been proud of carrying two bricks on the last of his journeys, and his father managed a warm smile as he dropped them at his feet.

“Good lad, good lad” he murmured.

Then, groaning, with his hand clamped on his wounded rib cage, he had stooped to put the last two bricks into place.



Now his father lay, ash grey skin tugged across the bones of his face. The boy went to tear some more material to replace the bloodied pad on his father’s side, as he had done every morning for a month now. As he eased the pad away from the skin no blood oozed. He was able to touch the wound’s jagged edge, and his nostrils could sense that the blood was no longer fresh.



He left that afternoon. He was going to his grandfather’s house, outside the city. His father had talked of that house as he slid in and out of consciousness in his final hours, and the boy had joined in these musings. He liked to visit his grandfather and sit out on his patio, the two of them playing Monopoly by the light of some candles. He was always allowed ‘Park Lane’ and ‘Mayfair’ – the two most expensive properties – as a head start.



As he emerged from the cellar, his battered Monopoly box under his arm, he remembered his father’s advice.



Stay away from the riders.

Listen for their engines.



He knew that the riders had wounded his father, who had staggered into the yard some four weeks previously bleeding heavily from his side. His father had told him that he must not leave the cellar from that point on. That it was too dangerous.

Things had got out of hand, he said.



At the end of the garden path, the boy paused, inhaling the lavender bush for the first time in a month.

He listened.

All was quiet. He began to trot along the road, wishing that the Monopoly set would stop its dull rattle. It caused him to stop every ten paces to listen again, so he decided it would be safer to walk.



Thirty minutes later he had another decision to make. Should he walk along the main road out of the city? He knew there would be sections of it where there would be no cover, where riders would be able to catch him out in the open. The boy knew no other route, however. He was following the journey he used to take in the back of his father’s car.

After looking left and right down the empty lanes, and scrunching up his face in an effort to hear any distant engines, he set off towards the north. His Monopoly set pieces rattled softly under his arm, and he settled into a pattern of strides that had him walking backwards for a couple of steps every twenty yards or so. Spinning round to face to the north again, he would enjoy the blur of green on the side of the road, then his focus would settle on the farthest point where the dusty asphalt disappeared between earth and sky.



His watch told him it was six o’clock, and this awareness made him shiver as the afternoon fell away. Driving to his grandfather’s house only took a couple of hours, and here he was at supper time, still on the carriageway. At supper time.

How his tummy growled. He reached in to his pocket, and felt the smooth skin of his apple. He thought he should stop, eat his apple and consider how he might spend the night. Over to the west, the sun was gilding the landscape. He placed the Monopoly set down and sat with his back to the low concrete retaining wall. He munched on his apple, the warmth of the wall and the serenity of the view before him putting in something approaching good spirits. This was, after all, quite an adventure, and he smiled as he envisaged the surprise on his grandfather’s face when he arrived. Then the memory of his father’s mushroom-grey face drifted in to focus. He looked down and rubbed some dust off the face of the cartoon figure on the front of his Monopoly box.



There was a rumbling, growling noise. First of all it formed a rough kind of backing track to the birdsong and the breeze through the branches of the fir trees nearby. Then the breeze was blotted out, and the birdsong stopped.



He dropped his head down below the level of the wall, and held his breath. The growl of the bike engines became louder, and he pressed his hands over his ears. Gritting his teeth, he prayed for the noise to end. But the pulse of the passing machines continued for several more seconds. He had got used to a single machine passing their house, when his father would raise his index finger to his lips to signal quiet in the cellar. Now the boy had his finger to his lips.



Finally, the last machine rumbled by, and a few seconds later the boy peered nervously to the North. A pother of dust still swirled around him , but he could see the back of the swarm of bikes buzzing towards the horizon.



The bird song and the breeze reasserted themselves, but they sounded different now. The wall was cold too, and the sun’s retreat meant that the gloom of the landscape to the West was creeping towards him. His half eaten apple was lying in the dust.



No other riders passed him by that night, as he lay, trembling with cold behind the wall. Presently, as streaks of grey began to reach across the sky from the East – four o’clock, according to his watch - he decided to get moving. This time his progress was tempered by the knowledge that he had to stay within dashing distance of some cover. He trotted along raised sectors of road, again wishing that his Monopoly box would stop rattling.



By early afternoon he had reached Junction 23 of the carriageway, which he recognised as the exit he needed to take. By now, he was exhausted and hungry. He sat in the grass verge, looking back down the way he had come. As he did so, he was trying to calculate how much further he had to go. He unlaced his shoes, now pale with dust, and eased them off. He pulled the sock on his right foot down to the heel, and touched the raw skin there. The inflammation told him there was a blister on the way.



He reached across the Monopoly box and slid the blue elastic band off. The contents were an anarchic jumble, as he expected. The boy tugged at some sycamore leaves and stuffed them in to the box in the hope of reducing the rattling noise when he was running. As he began to feed the elastic band over the box again, he heard a bike engine to the North. The band snapped and the lid refused to close. He snatched the box up in his grasp and ran, in a half crouch, up to the line of sycamores.



Breathless, with his heart thumping, he lay flat on his stomach, his chin resting on the Monopoly box. With a flash of nausea, he saw his shoes, side by side on the side of the road. The rider was getting nearer, but the boy couldn’t tear his gaze away from the shoes, and he cursed his own stupidity.



The rider’s engine coughed, and then stopped. The boy looked across the carriageway. He heard the squeak of leather as the rider dismounted, and the visor was pushed back. The rider was looking at the shoes.



For what seemed like an age, he stared across the two lanes of the Northern carriageway. He looked North and South, as if expecting someone, until he eased his right leg over the central crash barrier and strode across towards the shoes. Again, he looked back and forth along the road. He stooped over them, nudging them with the toe of his own calf length boots. The boy was sure that the deafening roar of his own heart would give him away as the rider scanned the line of trees, looking directly in his direction for several seconds.



Then, with a shrug, he snapped his visor back into place. Stooping down, his leathers squealing once more, he picked up the shoes. He spun round, marched off back to his bike and stuffed the shoes into a pannier at the back of the bike. Then with a last look in the boy’s direction, he kicked savagely at the bike, there was an angry roar, and he was gone. 



By this time the boy was thumping the grass in front of him, with angry and exhausted tears in full flow. The country road was below him to his right, and he knew that the route to his grandfather’s house was not as certain as he would like it to be. He dragged a sleeve across his eyes to clear away the tears and glared off in to the distance. He recognised the big barn on the ridge of a low hill, and his bleary gaze followed the road in that direction.



When he came to a crossroads half an hour later, the hill had been steeper then he’d remembered, and he looked down on his naked feet as he padded along. He enjoyed not having the back of the shoe rubbing his heel, but knew full well that this relief was short lived. By the time he stood outside the barn, looking back towards the carriageway, the soles of his feet felt hot.



He walked round to the other side of the barn, away from the cooling breeze, and sat with his back up against the warm wooden slats on the barn. A holly bush to his left meant that he could not be seen from the road. He curled up into a ball and tried to sleep.



Two hours later, his growling tummy was still keeping him awake. He was cold, too. He had rejected the idea of sleeping in the barn, some primeval instinct telling him that it belonged to someone else. But now he was driven inside by his body’s desperate need for some comfort, for some sleep.



The hefty door complained at being opened, and he stepped nervously into the sepulchral silence. All was still. There was enough light from a block of moonlight that came through a window high in the gable end to see a neat pile of hay bales before him. He quickly arranged half a dozen of them in to a bed, with a wall on the door side so that anyone looking in would be unable to see him. Then he stretched his legs out, and after some an initial seizure of panic when he thought he could hear footsteps outside, he fell in to a deep sleep, the dreams of his father being visions from a happier time, before the Rebellion, when they played football in the garden. He had thought about bringing the football, but finally left it with his father in the cellar. His old granddad preferred Monopoly, anyway.



He awoke in the freezing half light of dawn, rubbing his hair and clothes to shake out the straw. He slid out through the door of the barn, his Monopoly set under his arm, and gazed away towards the hills to the North. He recognized his next landmark – a white villa set in the forest that covered one of the hills, and he traced his route back to the barn. The villa’s position on the hill should make it an easy task in terms of navigation. He sighed, and moved towards the road, the slap of his feet on the mud reminding him of his folly back at the carriageway.



An hour later, his prayers for food were answered. He passed a blackberry bush, then stopped and ran back. Ten minutes later, his fingers and lips were strained a deep purple and he felt as though he needed to sleep again. But he kept going – he wanted to get to his grandfather’s house. The thought of another night out under the stars made him feel sick with fear.



So he pushed on, his sore feet getting hotter with a combination of the warmth of the tarmac and friction. He stopped out a ditch that had some stagnant brown water in it, and dangled his feet as he re-examined the contents of his Monopoly box. He reorganised the pieces in their proper containers, although he knew full well that once he tucked the box under his arm again chaos would reassert itself. He held up the racing car piece to the sky, driving it around an imaginary race track. Then he picked up the top hat, running his index finger around it, somehow soothed by the piece’s smooth surface. That was always his grandfather’s choice.



The thought of his grandfather spurred him on, and he was at the gate of the white villa an hour later. This lifted his spirits, as he knew that he was close to his grandfather’s home now. He peered in through the five bar gate, but the villa was silent. There was a smashed bay window by the front door, and a red car in the horseshoe driveway. The layer of leaves and dust on the windscreen told the story of the petrol crisis. He could never understand if the petrol crisis had caused the Rebellion, or vice versa.



He knew that beyond the villa the road dropped downhill into a wooded valley, and that his grandfather’s cottage stood in a river-loud glade on the other side.



His feet were so sore by now that he walking on the verge. Walking through the sharp, dry stalks of grass was preferable to the constant grating of his soles on the tarmac. Even so, the occasional thistle would have the boy hissing with pain, and he was sobbing from exhaustion and hunger. He knew his father would be telling him to dry his eyes and get on with the job, and would be urging him forward by reminding him how close he was now.



Just at the top of the hill.



He lifted his eyes from the verge. Now he could see the track that led into the wood behind his grandfather’s cottage. His father had brought him here just a couple of months ago, when the rioting in the city had subsided, and left the boy there for a blissful fortnight.

“Why are there no riots out here Granddad? And no riders?”

The old man had looked up from their game and looked out over the cleft in the trees below the porch.

“Well, lad, I don’t think they’ve found me yet.”



Now the boy was wiping his tears away, smearing them across his face, as he jogged along the track. His feet cooled as they padded along the grass, shaded as it was by a stand of gnarled oak trees.



As the trees parted on the down slope, he could see the porch. There, looking directly towards him was his grandfather, who stood and stared. He held a gingham dishcloth in his hands. He was moving his mouth – whether he was talking to himself, or calling, the boy didn’t know, for his dry throat was choking out more sobs, and the Monopoly set’s rattle filled the valley.



His grandfather met him fifty yards away from the porch, sweeping him up in his huge hands and dabbing away the tears with the dishcloth. The boy clung to his grandfather with a desperate surge of energy, mumbling the story of his father’s last days, and his own trek. The old man sat in the swing seat on the porch and just held him until the boy started to slide towards sleep. Before doing so, the boy took the monopoly box from under his arm and allowed his Grandfather to put it on the table.

Their table.

They would play tomorrow, he promised.