‘We were unable to live a normal life before the War,’ said the barman. ‘That’s why we all came here after the War.’
‘Terrible conditions,’ said the interpreter.
‘I take that badly,’ said the barman.
‘We will come in and inspect,’ said the interpreter, bowing. ‘Then we can make Full Report and recommend Aid.’
‘And Sanitation,’ said the barman, pulling his Walkie-Talkie from his belt.
The rest of the Delegation were climbing carefully out of the golf-buggies and leaving their travel umbrellas neatly folded on the seats. The Walkie-Talkie started crackling. ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, he said.
Seconds later, fifteen bikers wearing jeans and leathers, shades and bandannas, the fringes on their jackets flying, the weak sun glinting off their Ray-Bans, legs astride Harleys, scuffed boots on the foot-rests, tooled saddlebags showing the necks of Bud bottles, came tearing in front of the perimeter carriages and surrounded the golf-buggies. The Delegation put its twenty-three hands in the air. There had obviously been an incident once before.
‘We have Permit!’ protested the interpreter.
‘A permit assumes authority,’ said the barman. ‘A permit assumes control. There is no control and no authority here – not from the outside. Go back to Tech City – they built it for you.’
The bikers cheered, honked their horns, revved their 1400cc engines, dug their heels in the dirt and spun wheelies.
The Japanese climbed silently back into their electric golf-buggies. The interpreter bowed and assured the barman that he would be hearing from them, and their sponsors, very soon.
And then it happened.
A Harley rider rode up behind the golf-buggies, seeing them off like a two-wheeled sheepdog, when the interpreter noted that Illegal Substances were being used.
‘What illegal substances?’ asked the barman.
‘Petrol derivatives,’ said the interpreter.
‘Those bikes don’t run on petrol derivatives, you moron,’ said the barman. ‘They run on petrol – gas – tonnes of it.’
‘Petrol!’ said the interpreter. ‘Banned! I make Full Report.’
The Harley rider was unimpressed. He unhitched a dinky can of fuel from the back of his bike – like a Billy-bottle – and chucked the contents over the rear of the nearest golf-buggy. Petrol fumes coloured the grey air blue. Then the rider backed his bike in a semi-circle, took out a lighter and threw it at the golf-buggy. It exploded.
‘Jesus!’ said the barman, dragging the four half-on-fire Japanese to safety. The rest of the bikers commandeered the remaining two golf-buggies and occupants, chained them to the bikes and set off like a stock-car finale, dust in vertical towers, straight through the Guard’s Van entrance of the adjoining carriage and off into – who knows where?
The interpreter was running for his life, zigzagging through the fire, fumes, smoke and dust. A Burberry hat lay on the ground. The barman kicked it. ‘That’ll teach him to come with Aid and Sanitation.’
‘What about the others?’ I said, bewildered by the speed of it all.
‘What others?’ said the Barman. ‘I don’t see no others, do you?’
I followed him back into the bar. The champagne girls had gone. The sardines had gone. The bull terrier had gone. Spike had gone.
‘Excuse me …’I said.
The barman passed me a tumbler of whisky. ‘On the house,’ he said.
‘Tanks today surrounded the perimeter of the No Zone, known as Wreck City, in a bid to free eleven abducted members of the Japanese Peace Delegation. The Delegation had been intending to carry out a Humanitarian survey of conditions in the zone. A spokesman from MORE-Justice told reporters that it was time to take a tougher approach to No-Zone activities. “It’s just a den of thieves”, he said. “We left them alone while we were rebuilding our own infrastructure, but there is now no reason why anyone should be living outside Tech City. We have offered jobs and accommodation to anyone in the No Zone – an offer we still extend. This will be day one of a seven-day amnesty for any No-Zone inhabitants to come forward and live within the wider community of their fellow citizens. After that, we’re going in.”’
The barman switched off the news. ‘You’d better get out of here’, he said. ‘Nothing to stop you.’
‘Where’s my robot?’
‘Don’t ask me. This is a place where anything can happen. I guess she went with those girls. They live inside.’ He gestured with his thumb. ‘Rich refugees.’
‘I thought you said there were no refugees here.’
‘From the War, no, there aren’t. From Tech City – all the time. People are coming in droves. You don’t look stupid, so what do you think this is all about – this Japanese stuff?’
‘It’s your fault. You set their golf-buggies on fire.’
‘Not me personally. They were a set-up. It’s obvious. They wanted something to happen to them. They wanted an excuse. MORE excuses.’
‘You think that?’
‘Sure of it. It’s been brewing faster than Black Market beer. MORE want in. You should get out.’
‘I can’t leave without Spike – she’s making a TV broadcast tonight.’
‘Should have thought of that before you took her for a walk.’
I opened my mouth to protest. He held up his hand, glancing at the clock on the wall. ‘You got a few hours. OK. You can search for her, if you want to. I’ll take you through.’
My face must have registered confusion. He patted me with a palm the size of a spade. ‘Through to the Back. This is the Front. We live in the Back.’
I followed him down the train and past a restroom sign that said, ‘ladies/gents only’, and another that said ‘dogs only’. There was a water-tap beside it. My guide turned and held out his right spade. ‘My name’s Friday,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’
I said, ‘Billie Crusoe.’
We passed through the train and down a ramp into what looked like a gladiatorial arena. All around the arena were shanty-houses of three and four storeys, most with balconies supported on scaffolding poles and rigged with planks. Dogs and cats ran up and down, squirrels and monkeys swung from balcony to balcony. Chickens scratched in the dirt, and a donkey harnessed to a cart was waiting patiently to pull a fridge. A fat woman, in front of one of the houses, was cooking over a tin barrel, flames escaping from under the pan. The child next to her was wrestling with a baby leopard.
‘This is the Playa,’ said Friday. ‘We meet here when there’s anything to decide. See that bell?’
I looked up. I was in a Spanish playa, built like a favela, and here in front of me was a Venetian campanile.
‘We don’t have planning laws,’ said Friday. ‘You can build whatever you like here. It’s multi-cultural.’ He laughed like a chain-saw. ‘The bell rings when we meet.’
‘How many people live here?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘No one counts. The city stretches on – way past here and into the Unknown.’
‘What’s in the Unknown?’
‘If I could tell you that, it would be Known, wouldn’t it? It’s radioactive. It’s re-evolving. It’s Life after Humans, whatever that is, but you know what? It can’t be so much worse, can it?’
This was a strange man, a man, I’d say, with a Front and a Back. He wasn’t just a barman at all.
‘And animals,’ he said, ‘wild animals – you be careful if you go too far.’
‘What wild animals? Where from?’
Friday pointed to the monkeys. ‘They came from the Zoo – after the bombing. There were animals all over the place. Some were shot, some escaped. The ones who escaped came here, like everything else that didn’t want to go back into a cage.’
A Cadillac – pink – blasted past, fumes and fire bursting from the exhaust. A guy sat perched on the back with a museum-piece sound-system, speakers the size of tea-chests, and a flashing red’n’blue Wurlitzer Playbox. He was wearing more gold than an Aztec at a
funeral.
‘PARTY!’ he shouted. ‘PARTY!’
‘That’s tonight,’ said Friday, ‘but first you’d better find your robot.’
I took out my phone and stabbed at the buttons. No signal. No one to call. But who am I calling? In the detritus of texts and messaging, who am I really talking to and who is really there?
MORE has a dedicated number: Txt X. It’s a finger-and-thumb Samaritan line. Tell us your troubles, and we’ll respond. It’s a robot, but it doesn’t seem to matter – it’s a reply, a cry back from the Universe. Pick up a signal from a pulsar and say yes.
Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.
Keep me in the mop bucket or the slot where the grill pan goes, but don’t let me go because I love you.
Alone in the Playa, the sound of a throaty microphone caught my attention. An old man boiled brown by the sun was placing two pairs of kitchen steps a few metres apart, and laying a length of roofing baton between them.
An electronic keyboard crocodile-clipped to a car battery, and a nut-faced gypsy woman husking into the lollipop microphone announced a new attraction – the goat that walked the plank. Up he went, tiny cloven hoofs making a cymbal out of the step-ladder, leather lead jerked gently by the grandfather in his stained woollen suit. Across the plank went the goat, in time to the keyboard and the wonder-working commentary of the woman, who began to sing ‘MY WAY’. Her son bounded forward into the ring with a hula-hoop of fire and coaxed two poodles out of the van. Yes! Through the fire, legs stretched behind and before like flying dogs. Yes! The goat has reached the end of time, is turning round and coming back, dragging the world with him, an inflatable globe on the end of his lead.
The daughter came forward, fringed dress, high heels, bustier, red lips, black hair. She was clapping her hands, hustling for money, and the waist-stripped boys gathering round started throwing coins and cigarettes.
It was going well until a bullet-headed dog shot into the performing ring and started a fight with one of the poodles. The son went to grab it, swearing in Spanish, but the dog bit him, toppled the goat-plank, and swerved, circular and away, down a gap between two leaning buildings.
I started to run. It was the bull terrier.
It is not easy to keep up with a terrier. I have never understood the physics of legs. My legs are longer, so why can’t I keep up with a dog? Even dogs with very short legs run faster than humans with long legs. How does this work?
I clutched my bag to me and concentrated on the chase. I hardly noticed the trash-cans we toppled, the crates we crashed through, the mounds of scrap metal we leaped, like we were hurdling at the Olympics. There was a streaming ditch – we jumped it. There was barbed wire – under it for the dog, ripped shirt for me. Allotments, cabbages, sheds, trees, a forest ahead … The dog vanished.
I stopped, winded, alone, taking it in.
In front of me, barring my way, was a petrified forest of blackened and shocked trees, silent, like a haunted house. I moved towards it, frightened of what I would find, with an instinct for danger that only happens when there really is danger.
I moved through the first rows of trees. Their bark had a coating – like a laminate. Further in, deeper, I could see that these trees were glowing. Was this place radioactive?
Underfoot was soggy, not mossy soggy, not water-logged, but like walking on pulped meat.
It wasn’t only that the forest was silent – no bird noise, animal sound, tree cracking, it was that I had become silent. My footsteps sank into the pulp, and because I was afraid, my whole body had quietened itself, like a child hiding in a cupboard, afraid of the adult outside.
My heart was beating too fast and I was sweating. Beyond the No Zone was the Red Zone, policed and controlled. Was this the edge of the Red Zone?
‘Walk backwards slowly.’ I heard the voice and didn’t turn. I did as I was told and, step by step by step, came out from the brink of the forest into the field where I had lost the dog.
‘Stand still.’
I stood still. I heard a crackling, like a bad transmitter.
‘You’re radioactive, but it will pass.’
I turned round. There was Friday. ‘You followed me!’
‘Someone had to – I told you to be careful. This is the Dead Forest.’
‘The Red Zone?’
‘Part of it. They don’t patrol it here because they hope it will kill us all. If you can’t nuke your dissidents, the next best thing is to let the degraded land poison them. But it’s not quite happening like that. A lot of us have been sick, a lot of us have died, but it’s changing. Something is happening in there. I’ve been in with a suit. There’s life – not the kind of life you’d want to get into bed with, or even the kind of life you’d want to find under the bed, but life. Nature isn’t fussy.’
‘Who are you?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Come and get something to eat.’
We walked back across the field towards the tended area and the beginnings of the buildings. Friday took me towards a low shack made out of steel girders sunk upright into concrete and bolted together at their necks, Frankenstein-style. Corrugated iron had been screwed to the frame and painted bright blue. There were no windows but the roof was made of clear corrugated plastic.
Inside the bright and cheerful room, a long seventeenth-century elm table ran down the middle, surrounded by an assortment of chairs. The walls had been windproofed with old duvets, held in place with cross-wise ropes, and the floor seemed to be insulated with tamped-down sand covered with cheap rush matting, like a giant table mat. There was a fireplace and a TV turned on with the sound down. There were bookshelves stacked with books. I touched them.
Books had been lost like everything else in the War, and Post-3War we hadn’t returned to print media. Natural wastage was the economic argument: why go back to something that was on the way out anyway? You can order books from Print on Demand, but most people use Digital Readers now, or don’t read at all. The younger kids have never known book culture so they don’t miss it.
‘Books,’ I said, using the noun like a memory prompt.
‘Books came here like people and animals,’ said Friday. ‘Certain people, certain animals, looking for a landing-place.’
He went through a curtain into a makeshift kitchen. There was a strong smell of coffee as he turned the hand grinder.
I took a book from the shelf – James Cook, The Journals: At daybreak I sent a Ship to looke for a landing-place.
‘What was that?’ called Friday.
I didn’t answer, went through into the kitchen area where he was spooning the strong ground coffee into a jug.
‘Can you throw a match on the burner?’
I hunted around for the pack and gingerly lit what can only be described as one of those Tarmac burners the Murphys used to use when mending the roads. The wide flame scorched my nose. Friday banged down a huge tin kettle and started to heat a frying-pan.
‘After the bomb …’ he said, but I wasn’t listening. I was remembering.
No one in the West believed we would be bombed. North Korea, China, Pakistan, Iran, all too different, too factionalized. We spread our wars where necessary, and called it peace-keeping. It was bloody and messy. There were terrorists, there were local incidents, a bus here, a bank there, the Eurostar blown up – that was bad. JFK crippled by a ground-staff effort planned over six years.
But that only made the fight for freedom more urgent.
Then the bomb – bombs – that left the cities of the West as desperate and destroyed as the cities of the East where we had waged our righteous wars and never counted the cost.
After the fire-rip, after the heat, after the towers that fell in rubble, after the hous
es that collapsed like sucked-in paper bags, after the molten rain, the nuclear wind, the blacked-out sun, the buildings with their fronts torn off, the riverside apartments gutted, the river a stinking ditch, the roads blocked with concrete and ash, the burning that made surfaces unwalkable and fired cars untouchable, the running away, the refugees, the helicopters hanging in the choked air, the never-stopping sound of sirens, the hoses shooting filthy water over steaming metal. The ugliness of the ruins – that was a shock – the ugliness of what we had built, the ugliness of how we had destroyed it, the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of twenty-first-century world.
Whiteout. Done.
I had been in the British Library, researching the history of artificial intelligence. It was the books that saved my life. As the building collapsed I fell on to a raft of books, and stacks of books fell on to me, knocking me unconscious but casing me from further damage. I came round, pushed myself out of the mountain of books, and started to walk home through the blasted streets, in shock, aware, somewhere, that people were running and screaming, and that everywhere, like one of those archive films of detonated demolitions, buildings were falling.
The noise must have been devastating but I didn’t hear it. My brain had turned off the sound in my head. I found out later that this happens: that the brain can refuse sensory input in order to protect itself. And so I walked through a silent, falling, burning world until I came to where my home had been.
It was still partly there, and I climbed the exposed stairs and in through the blown door, and under the dust and small fire and, without conscious thought, I packed two bags that I could carry and I left. I know I was in shock, I know that is why everything was silent – not slow-motion, the speed was there – but blanked out.
I spent days outside, like everyone else, sheltering where we could, eating what was found or given, and gradually there was aid and something like order, and we were moved into temporary camps. The Government made announcements but no one was listening. It was MORE that took over, made sense of it all, denounced the politicians, and spent the considerable profits of their global company on recovering a modest piece of normal life.