The Night of the Triffids Page 4

  'Excellent, Merryweather. Excellent. Anything else of note?'

  'From the plants we extract oil that can be used in the manufacture of certain foods and refined to make fuel for motors. From them we also get raw ingredients for plastics and for a variety of drugs. We use their fibres for rope, and the dried remains of processed plants, mashed into cakes, are fed to cattle.'

  'Well done.'

  'The plant can produce a rattling noise by striking small sticklike growths against its own stem. William Masen considered that they might be communicating with each other but, as yet, there is no evidence to support this.'

  'Superb, Merryweather. Please sit down. Now, to history, noble history…'

  ***

  Occasionally it did irritate me to hear my father being quoted as if he were some long-dead scientist. But, more often than not as the bright students efficiently gave their condensed lectures, my eyes would be drawn to the window where I'd gaze dreamily at the clouds floating through a deep blue sky as lightly as feathers. Then I'd imagine myself sitting snugly in the cockpit of an aeroplane, listening to the sweet hum of a pair of Merlin engines and feeling the vibration of those throbbing cylinders running through the joystick to tickle the palm of my hands. Yes. Adventure was in my blood.

  And so, as always, my daydreams would take me far away from the classroom to a world beyond my safe but mundane island home.

  Speaking of home, it might be interesting for anyone who should happen to read this to know something about the island community. When my family arrived on the Isle of Wight some twenty-five years ago, after their dramatic flight from Shirning in a triffid-infested England, the island's population stood at a mere few hundred.

  The population, however, steadily increased as more refugees reached the island from the Irish Republic, the British mainland and even from the continent of Europe where waves of triffids spreading from the Russian steppes drove human survivors westward until their backs were to the Atlantic.

  In Western Europe the most sizeable communities were based in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight and the larger Scottish Isles, while the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic formed the northernmost community. Mainland Britain and Europe were largely no-go areas. Triffids extended in vast ambulatory forests, choking open fields and city streets alike.

  From exploratory flights and careful monitoring of radio broadcasts we learned of a few small communities hanging on by the skin of their teeth on the mainland, permanently besieged by the triffid armies. Besides the Western European groups, there were other communities throughout the world, all as fragile as one another. Many were lost to the triffids, natural disasters, disease, famine - even, ludicrously, to wars that pitted man against man.

  The great bulk of the world's population died in those first few months of Year One of the catastrophe. It was estimated that the entire population of the globe now might not number above one million men, women and children. Perhaps a third of those were unsighted.

  In the light of such a dizzying drop in the population it was no wonder, then, that our island council placed such a priority on repopulation. After all, those first few hundred who had made their home on the Isle of Wight all those years ago must have been rattling round its one hundred and forty-seven square miles like the proverbial pea in an oil drum.

  Women of childbearing age were encouraged to have as many children as possible. Half a dozen was considered the minimum. But Mother Nature herself would often override with ease any plans made by humans.

  My mother, for instance, lost the ability to have any more children with the birth of my youngest sister by Caesarean. (This left my mother and father with a total of three offspring.)

  The most radical initiative was the creation of the Mother Houses. Even though I'd been born on the mainland, I'd come to the island as a very young boy. So I was really a child of the colony myself, didn't care a fig about the morals and social conventions of the Old World, and didn't find the idea of the Mother Houses at all strange.

  But when the idea was mooted more than twenty years ago there was outrage; many left the island to join communities on Jersey and Guernsey that adhered to what some considered a stricter moral code. Simply, the plan was that unsighted women of childbearing age would be invited (some said coaxed, others claimed coerced) into becoming professional mothers.

  Initially, the project stipulated that a sighted man would have a 'harem' of unsighted women as well as a sighted wife.

  Uproar!

  But the idea didn't go away.

  Instead, under the guidance of 'Matrons' (these were older women, mainly unsighted and all above childbearing age) professional mothers took over many of the larger country houses. They made it quite clear that these would be governed democratically, yet with strictly no involvement by men - administrative involvement, that was: human biology hadn't yet reached a stage where the female of the species could reproduce without needing at least the bare necessities from the male.

  In a nutshell, Mother Houses functioned as self-governing communities of women who were dedicated to producing babies fathered by men they chose. Soon the Mother Houses overflowed with new babies. Buildings nearby were converted to nurseries, then, as the children grew, yet more buildings were turned over to schools. Mother Houses, without a doubt, were here to stay. And I must say I rather liked them. They were always cheerful places, if a bit noisy. And they produced happy, robust children who counted every child in the Mother House as their brother or sister and every woman as 'Mother'.

  One development that caught even the Council by surprise was that rather than becoming ghettos for unhappy blind women who couldn't find a sighted husband, the Mother Houses and their occupants were treated with the same kind of respect and admiration as holy orders of nuns had been in the Old World. So much so that many sighted girls who were born on the island elected to join them, even at certain times symbolically 'blinding' themselves by covering their eyes with scarves.

  Some of the older members of the community, particularly the narrow-minded, grumbled darkly about the Mother Houses, referring to the Mothers as 'those bloody reverse nuns' or the local House on its hill as 'Mothering Heights', while hinting that the places were hotbeds of sex. But, oddly, that wasn't true. In a strange way the Mothers were mainly perceived as extremely pure and chaste (even though they might bear ten children fathered by ten different men). And they certainly didn't sponge off the rest of the community; in fact, they soon became 'exporters' of produce. My old schoolteacher Mr Pinz-Wilks (who I rather suspect considered that the only civilization of note fell with the departure of the last Roman emperor) commented rather admiringly that the Mothers appeared to him as earthly embodiments of the classical goddess Artemis who was revered not only as the goddess of hunting but also incorporated the apparent dichotomy of opposites in the fact she was worshipped as both divine protector of chastity and of motherhood.

  The Mother system worked. It worked beautifully.

  The birth rate on the island was strong. Together with the welcome flow of immigrants it helped to swell the island's population to a healthy twenty-six thousand. This was perhaps a quarter of the island's original population before Year One.

  Pretty good work, you'd allow, all things considered.

  ***

  There comes a time, at least once, when father and son speak to each other not as parent and child but man to man. As equals.

  For me, this came just a few hours before the whole world was plunged into darkness on that fateful 28 May.

  It began as many conversations with my father began. In his greenhouse, as he took a break from those things that had rooted themselves so firmly, and inextricably, into his life.

  He poured me a coffee from the thermos, asking 'Tin or china?' while indicating two cups on the work bench. 'Tin.'

  'Good choice.' Then he poured the dark liquid, shaking his head wistfully. 'Oh, for the aroma of Colombian coffee beans once more, or maybe a smooth Kenyan blend.
Roast acorns… whatever new tricks we might learn to flavour them they'll never taste like real coffee.' He filled his pipe with a few shreds of that pale brown Jersey tobacco grown on our largest Channel Island, gazing dreamily at the triffid plants growing in line in their brick troughs, the sunlight shining through the glass onto their leaves. These triffids had had their stingers safely docked and they'd been chained to stakes to prevent them from walking. Even so, they would still give an occasional experimental tug on their chains. Every now and again, a chink-chink could be heard as steel links rattled.

  As a child I had sensed that there was something thrilling about this place - the smell of the plants under the glass, the warm, almost tropical atmosphere even in winter. I liked to come here and watch my father handling a sharp knife with all the dexterity of a surgeon as he pruned branches, or nicked the stem to gauge the quality of triffid oil that would 'bleed' from the bark like blood that had been diluted to a pale pink.

  After a moment spent contemplating the plants he scratched one of his bushy white eyebrows and said, 'You should have heard them talking last night.'

  'The triffids?'

  My father nodded, and shot me a sidelong smile. 'I've not heard them so active in a long, long while; their sticks were rap-rapping away against their stems like some botanical version of Morse code.'

  'Do you think they really can talk? Intelligently, I mean, not just like birds calling to each other?'

  'Well, birds and other animals do communicate with their own kind - send messages, squawk warnings, whatever.'

  'But in a purely instinctual way: they're either sounding a predator alert or trying to attract a mate.'

  'True. But I do wonder whether triffids have mastered the art of conveying more complex messages to their own kind.' He pulled deeply on his pipe before exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that swirled up into the sunlight. 'Perhaps they can even explain concepts and ideas to their neighbours.'

  'You mean, that triffid over by the door might be passing on a message to one at the other end of the greenhouse along the lines of "Just listen to those two humans, they're talking about us again".'

  My father chuckled. 'Maybe, maybe. But I did once work with a man called Lucknor who seemed to develop an intuitive understanding of triffids. He was convinced that they did actually talk to each other and, moreover, that they had a highly developed intelligence.'

  'You think he was right?'

  'I think he was damn close.' He scratched that white eyebrow again, an old habit when he was in a contemplative mood. 'But, you know, David… I must have dissected thousands of those things and I've yet to find any trace of a nervous system, and I've certainly not had so much as a whiff of anything that could remotely be described as a brain. Still… I have watched how those plants operate, watched for the last forty years. They move with purpose. They communicate by tapping their sticks against their stems. When they lash out with their stings they "know" to aim for a human's unprotected face. And I've watched them move across the countryside, whole legions of them like infantry on the march; I've seen how they home in on a community, how they lay siege to it.' He sipped his coffee. 'Well, maybe I am stopping short of saying that they are intelligent, but if something has four legs, wags its tail and barks you'd say it was a dog, right? Now those plants there act and react and plan and attack and kill just as if there was some cool intellect hiding somewhere inside them.'

  'But can we beat them?'

  'Oh, indeed we're going to try. Try our damned hardest.' He gazed at the plants again before shooting a sideways glance at me. 'After all, I don't believe they should inherit the Earth, do you?'

  The plants replied for me. Until now they'd been silent, but suddenly they began to tap their sticks against their stems. It sounded like mischievous schoolboys deliberately trying to irritate their teacher by drumming their fingers quickly on the desks as soon as 'Sir' turned his back to chalk a homework assignment on the blackboard.

  My father looked at me with a smile.

  'And there they go again… my children of the soil. Talking.'

  I listened to the plants drumming their little sticks. I thought I could hear their rhythm and I sensed a tempo that communicated an urgency now, as if each triffid was passing on a secret message to its neighbour.

  At that moment I would have sworn that a sense of excitement had rippled through the twenty or so triffids shackled there in the greenhouse.

  My father recognized it, too. When he spoke this time he addressed the triffids themselves. 'What have you heard, then? Has one of your armies conquered another of our human communities? Is Triffid High Command planning to march once more? Are you eager to join them?'

  It might have been coincidence, or it might have been their response to my father's questions that he'd delivered in a manner half flippant, half serious, but the rap-rap-rap of stick against stem suddenly swelled into a wave of noise. There was a powerful clamouring; chains rattled as the plants tugged against them. Stems whipped from side to side like corn being blown this way and that by a sudden gale.

  I could well have believed at that moment that somehow those plants had just been stirred by a rousing call to arms from one of their kind across the sea. Now, in their own inscrutable way, they responded. The rattling of sticks was their ecstatic applause, their side-to-side swayings were waves of jubilation.

  They sensed impending battles. Imminent victories.

  I could believe this as easily as I believed that the sun would rise tomorrow.

  My father watched this display of triffid noise, movement and - maybe - even emotion. His grey hair caught the sunlight as he shook his head slowly. His face betrayed not one iota of what he himself might be feeling.

  After a moment's silence he began, 'David. At the centre of me there has always been this iron-hard core of optimism, but lately… I'm beginning to have doubts, you know?'

  'But surely we're safe, here on the island, from the triffids?'

  'We're holding our own, son. But every now and again I wonder. Perhaps we're really living in the eye of the storm. Secure for the moment, maybe.'

  'Then you think that this is some kind of fool's paradise?' I'd not heard my father express these kind of doubts before; it troubled me. 'That we can't make a go of this community after all?'

  'What I will say is this: by sheer good fortune we've been given a breathing space after escaping here from the mainland. A respite. The last twenty-five years have been a lull - a peaceful, even prosperous lull, I'll grant you. But I think we must face a harsher reality: that at some point in the future we shall encounter our greatest challenge yet.'

  'But we are succeeding here. We have order, commerce, transport, homes, a growing birth rate.'

  'Indeed we have - and that is a miracle in its own right. But we've grown complacent. Here we are, safe on our little island. However, we've largely turned our back on the outside world, with the exception of the other English Channel island communities.' He looked at me levelly for a moment. Then he began to speak to me in a low but grave voice. 'David, listen to me. We are a society that has become brilliant at the art of repair. Recycling, refurbishing, renewing. But we are not building from scratch. We don't dig ores out of the ground in order to smelt them into refined metals. If we're not doing that, how can we possibly even begin to build brand new tractors or cars - or even to cast so much as a humble teaspoon? These days, if we can't find a half-decent tractor that was built before the world went blind we cannibalize half a dozen clapped-out old tractors and cobble together just one that will do the job. Those aircraft you fly? The newest one is over thirty years old - thirty years, David: they should be museum pieces by now.' He made a slow chopping motion with his hand to emphasize his words. 'David. Whatever we are achieving isn't enough. We must move forward from scavenging on this - this carrion of a dead civilization. We must begin to invent once more, to develop new machines. And we should be able to do all that from scratch: by mining ore, by smelting, by casting new
components - because one day there will be nothing left of the old world to scavenge. Then, without a shadow of a doubt, we shall decline into a new Dark Age. One from which we might never emerge.'

  It was suddenly clear to me, startlingly clear. My father foresaw a future devoid of the light of civilization; one engulfed by all the dark terrors such a time of chaos and anarchy would bring.

  Later that morning I drove in a carefully maintained forty-year-old boneshaker from the car pool through the sunlit Downs to Shanklin where my flying boat was moored, ready for the short hop across to the mainland. (A flight, you will recall, that would be cut short by the gull's suicide dive.) As I eased the car along the narrow country lanes I thought about what my father had told me. And I wondered what form that new Dark Age would take.

  As it was, my contemplation of an impending metaphorical nightfall was far off the mark. Because the black horrors to come were literal. The darkness actual.

  And absolute.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NIGHTLANDS

  I left the post office at a hell of a run. In my left hand I held the lit lamp. In my right, a cupboard door that I'd broken off its hinges, which would, I prayed, serve as a shield if I came within range of a triffid's lashing sting.