"Hope" being the innocent girl running away with her Bill, who becomes a murderer of children...? Their own child died? And then a pandemic strikes...
Intriguing, and beautiful in its vernacular.
One maniac pulled his fat hand cross her mouth, and like magnets, her pale eyes glinted direct on mine. She'd sensed me there somehow. Often, I've seen it that when a person knows they will sure die soon, they become for a time almost magically in tune with the world.
I felt a warm breath just then on my cheek, quiet and small to the side of me, from inside the desk shelf. I turned slow. The lad was curled tiny in the shadows of files and folders. He put one snotty finger to his mouth, shh.
I gave a half nod back, aye, be fockin' quiet as a mouse, and then the big bastard was raping his mother, and the lad's eyes were crawling like lizards in his head, and he smothered his ears with his little hands when they slit her throat, nand I gazed curious at her wan face staring back at mine with all sorts of songs and words in it whilst she made a sound in her throat like witches casting curses.
I should explain that Bill first left off calling me Hope when us bairn died, which was what I was baptised. 'Hope?' he'd hissed at me at her funeral, as they sank her little pink casket in the frosted hard ground. 'What's Hope to me?' I can remember how the sky looked when he said it, the churchyard's black bare trees like slashes in the whtie, as if we could see reet throug hto the void of elsewhere. The weeds that choked the gravestones, the chill, the stink of foxes in the nettles by the gate. I'd not eaten days but for the half-stale sleeping tablet of my mum's slipped between my lips in the car. So I'd nowt of substance to say on my name. Bill took to calling me Glory after that, just like this song they'd chant at his football. It was his magickal name for me, he announced, magickal with a k so as not to be confused with conjuring tricks. As if what he started to dabble in was any more preternatural.
The knackerman, he'd abe able to follow easy which. He was granted his own judgement to cull any of the don-fer ones and load the carcases in tipper and bring them back for disposal. He'd make a note of any that looked badly, and where they were, so my da could go up and have a look-see.
The proper name for this profession when it's advertised is 'fallen stock operator,' but nobody round ours would call it that over the fence. It was a job that required the strong stomach and pallid detachment of an abattoirman.
See, on this land, we live by a constant, and us families, we go back solid as stone for time: dependable stock, no fussing. Slow in choosing, slower in changing. We ken us place. And naw, we'd gan too quick over and caught us shins, bringing in this unknown entity for the sake of a few pennies, and shit, if we weren't bloody paying for it straight off. 'False economy, see,' Ma rattled as she moved the tea things to the sink. 'Yer da would rather scrape mould off a spoilt apple than buy a pound fresh up' market a shilling.'
The lad didn't much react; he just kept looking at the clouds, blinking. I suppose he'd meant sommat else. Maybe that all his friends were dead, and his mam too, and the pier, so exciting in the photos he'd probably seen at school, would naw be full of stinking bodies anyway, and the slot machines wouldn't be the same without all that hustle and bustle and the machines all dinging and music blaring with that edge of golden happiness when you win a line of paper tickets; that smell of sugar coming off the laughing girls' mouths, and the throng of it all he'd so been looking forward to that someone had most likely told him all about already.
