The Stone Gods

  ‘Buy on the sound of cannon fire,’ was the advice of a nineteenth-century Rothschild. War is an opportunity. MORE took the opportunity, and no one blames them. Everyone else had failed: government, anti-government, the Church, the pressure groups, the media. The unthinkable, unspeakable, unstoppable had happened. Where do you turn? You turn to the hand that feeds you, the one that houses you. Who cares whether or not it was elected?

  ‘After the War,’ said Friday, ‘the first two years were the same for everyone. We survived how we could.’

  I nodded. He was breaking eggs with one hand into the smoking pan. ‘Then some of us started asking questions, wondering what the “No MORE War” campaign was really about.’

  ‘But they were right,’ I said. ‘A war like that must never happen again.’

  ‘We’ve said that before,’ said Friday. ‘Twice. And it did.’

  ‘But MORE are building a new network of trade agreements that is ending decades of unequal treatment across the world. There won’t be another oil war.’

  ‘No, there won’t, because we’ve given up oil the way we gave up coal. We had to do that anyway – we all knew we were frying the planet. The reason we didn’t do it, in the rich West, was because India and China were never going to do it till they’d drained every drop. They had a right to industrialize – they weren’t going to go to hand-wringing classes about the planet.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, the War has been wonderful for the Western economy – or it will be. We’ve been developing non-fossil-fuel-dependent technologies but barely using them because they’re more expensive than the old-fashioned heavy hitters of oil and coal. Pollution was still cheap. How could the West mend its ways when the developing and industrializing world was going to compete at any cost? We couldn’t afford to be the good guys. Now, look, Post-3War, all countries of the world must adopt best practice. All countries must phase out fossil-fuel dependency and oil economies. We’ve shaved our heads, repented of the damage done to the planet and its peoples, and become a generation sick of the words “economic growth”.’

  ‘All good,’ I said.

  ‘In theory, yes’, he said. ‘In fact, the West will race ahead – we are the new clean green machine, and the developing world will stay the way we wanted it to stay – raw materials and cheap labour.’

  ‘But we’re cheap labour. Nobody earns money any more. Nobody wants to.’

  ‘We’re hurt, we’re battered. It will change, but by then MORE will control everything and everyone. They’ll decide the future, just as they decide the present.’

  We sat down to eat at the beautiful table. ‘It was my grandfather’s’, he said. ‘I lay under it when the roof fell in. Come to think of it, in my life, the roof was always falling in but I had never had the sense to get under the table.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What does anybody ever mean? Marriages, children, all the things that went wrong. Two wives down and kids who don’t speak to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Nobody I know – ever knew – seems to have that old-fashioned thing called a happy marriage any more. We seem to have lost the knack of happiness.’

  ‘Too much feeling is bad for you’, he said. ‘Asking men to have feelings was a mistake. Of course we have feelings, but why own up to them?’

  He spooned the food into his mouth. He was good-looking in a discontented sort of way. Troubled, difficult … He shoved the bread across the table towards me. ‘It’s a pity the dinosaurs were wiped out.’

  ‘What dinosaurs?’

  ‘The usual ones – the ones that were suddenly extinct. If they had stayed around, human beings could never have evolved. I’d rather not be here at all than hand it all over to an unelected global business.’

  ‘That’s why I think the Robo sapiens is a good idea – neutral, objective decisions taken for the global good.’

  ‘Believe that and you’ll believe anything’, said Friday. ‘I would prefer to be free, not be told what to do by a robot.’

  ‘Oh, come on, were we free when we could run up debt buying mountains of stuff we didn’t want, made by people living on a dollar a day? Free to pay the mortgage? Free to go to work to pay off the mortgage? Free to vote for the party that pressed the red button that said, “BOMB”?’

  ‘Women have such fucking literal minds’, he said. ‘Get a wider vision. You’re looking at specifics all the time. I’m trying to talk about what it means to be human.’

  ‘What it means to be human,’ I said, ‘is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsible, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside.

  ‘And I think it means love.’

  ‘Love’, he said. ‘Just Nature’s way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.’

  ‘Is that what you really believe?’

  ‘It’s what my wives really believed.’

  He stood up, ran his hand along the contours of the table-top. His hand: flat, open, palm-down, strong. The nails clipped and clean. He looked at me. I nearly touched him. There are so many things that we nearly do and they don’t matter at all, and then there are the things that we nearly do that would change everything.

  He looked at me. He turned to clear the plates.

  Suddenly, on the TV, sound down, picture on, I saw an image of Spike. I couldn’t move. It was as though I was standing on a magnet. Friday turned up the sound.

  ‘MORE Security has just announced that the Robo sapiens, unveiled on Channel One last night, has been stolen. The life-size talking head, known affectionately as Spike by workers at MORE-Futures, was taken from the laboratory this morning by an employee on routine programming duties. The head was not authorized to leave the MORE complex. She had been expected to make her first public broadcast this evening. A MORE spokeswoman said she feared a terrorist plot …’

  Friday was laughing. ‘There you are’, he said. ‘Terrorist plot. What did I tell you? It’s going to be the same old stuff creeping back – already we’ve got an Us and a Them. Seems like you’ve turned into a Them. What are you going to do about it, Billie?’

  I was so scared I didn’t answer. Got my bag and left the shack.

  I had to calm down. I had to think. Try the phone again. Dead.

  WristChip – they’ll track the WristChip. If I take it off it sends a signal to indicate that is what I have done.

  I started walking – any direction – not thinking clearly. How can I explain? Who will believe me? Walking, walking, and over the wide grass field is the black massy hulk of the Dead Forest. Radioactive – enough to screw the signal from the chip?

  I stood on the pulpy extremity, feeling myself start to sweat. It looked like nothing from Nature: its baleful aspect was more like a nineteenth-century asylum than anything life had created.

  I stepped forward. It was like walking into a corpse, only the corpse wasn’t dead.

  As I walked deeper I became aware of a glow on the bark of the trees, and then I saw that the masts of the trees, like me, were sweating. I put out my hand. The bark was greasy and cold. Cold sweat.

  The trees had no leaves. It was May. I thought of something I’d read about the impossible beauty of the landscape before the industrial revolution. Particularly the beauty of woodland, because an oak takes three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live, and three hundred years to die. Unless you have a chain-saw. Or a bomb.

  My country, the British Isles, was a wooded place, a place so wooded that when the Romans rowed up the Thames they could find no landing-place.

  Now I can’t find any landing-place either, not for the woods but for the loss of them. I scan the shoreline, search, settle, then there’s a car park
coming, or another road, or a new development of executive homes, or an Olympic stadium. But that was before the War. Post-3War, we’re lucky to have anything left. I’m lucky to be alive enough to be unhappy.

  And perhaps I have to say that the landing-place I am really looking for isn’t a place at all: it’s a person, it’s you. It’s the one place they can’t build on, buy or bomb because it doesn’t exist anywhere where they can find it.

  But it doesn’t seem to exist anywhere where I can find it either.

  This wood wasn’t an oakwood; it had been a beech-wood. I found a branch of black leaves on the ground. Beech was disappearing even before the war because it needs a cool climate, so it was an early casualty of climate change in England. I love the way beeches keep their leaves so late, and the way the leaf buds open late to show bright green serrated edges and soft insides. Even in May the beech would still be showing last year’s dried terracotta leaves, the new buds about to make a green against them, and the bark darker, like a piebald animal.

  Beech trees are easy to climb, and in their tops is a green and secret world. At their bottoms, underfoot is the crunch of the sharp-shelled beech nuts, and a different world, lower, mysterious, the micro-tunnels of mice and weasels.

  These worlds need nothing from us, except that we leave them alone – but we never do.

  There were no sharp sounds underfoot in this wood. The sickening sinking of each step, slight but perceptible, was like the edges of quicksand. I couldn’t trust my walking, though there was no obvious danger. I wished there was a bird, I wished I was Siegfried; I wished that the stories of buried treasure were really true. Nothing of any value could be buried in this place. The soil itself was poisoned.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  But where should I be, in a world so changed as ours?

  Here I am, and the wood is glowing.

  Ahead of me there’s something moving.

  I speeded up to follow it, cutting through the lines of black trunks, and after about ten minutes, I came to spaces where the trees had been cleared or cleared themselves, and pushing out of the ground were small, stunted leaves with anaemic yellow stems. Feeding on the leaves and stems were five or six rabbit-like animals – hairless, deformed, one with red weals on its back. They ran away when they saw me. Movement again. I turned, followed further, and then I saw it – saw them.

  A boy and a girl. Perhaps. Holding hands, barely dressed, both with rags tied round their bodies. The boy was covered with sores, the girl had no hair.

  ‘Friend’, I said, holding out my hand. They didn’t move. I felt inside my bag. There was a bottle of water and a wholegrain bar. An orange and a banana. My lunch. I threw these things towards them. The boy grinned. He had no teeth. The girl picked up the offerings. I saw her arm was bleeding. I took out my handkerchief, gestured to her arm, made a pantomime of wrapping the handkerchief around the wound. I took a step forward. They took a step back.

  Slowly I took off my sweater and shirt, leaving myself in a silk vest. I placed the sweater and shirt and handkerchief in a heap, and walked backwards and away. I had almost forgotten the wrist tag. I unstrapped it, dropped it. The boy came forward and took the clothes and food. He held up the shirt, sniffed it, put it on, and gave the sweater to the girl.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said, gesturing, but I knew they would not.

  I walked away, backwards, partly not to frighten them and partly not to frighten myself. Who were they? How many more?

  On the outskirts of the Dead Forest towards the open field, I could hear a helicopter above me somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. Maybe they were looking for me. I had no idea what I was going to do, but it occurred to me that this was usual, and it is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose.

  At the field’s edge, there was Friday again. I wasn’t pleased to see him.

  ‘You’ll get sick if you go in there’, he said.

  ‘People are sick in there’, I said. ‘I saw two children. We have to help them.’

  He shook his head. ‘We can’t. They’re toxic radioactive mutants. They won’t live long. It’s Tech City’s big secret, one of them anyway. The incurables and the freaks are all in there. They feed them by helicopter. A lot of women gave birth just after the War finished. No one knew what would happen to the babies – well, now we do. Those are kids from nuclear families.’

  ‘But there are hospitals’, I said. ‘I’ve visited them.’

  ‘That’s the clean shiny version. The Dead Forest is the rest.’

  He started walking. ‘We found your robot.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The girls took her home with them. I’ll take you there now. I know you don’t like me, but you can trust me.’

  ‘I don’t usually trust people I don’t like.’

  ‘So you don’t like me …’

  I blushed. ‘I don’t like your theories. Maybe you’re great with dogs and children. Anyway, I don’t even know who you are or anything about you. I can’t judge.’

  ‘We judge a person in the first two minutes. You couldn’t judge me because I’m practised at being someone else. In the bar I’m just a rough, tough bouncer – I do it because, believe me, there’s plenty of people from Tech City who aren’t just coming to drink. They know what some of us are in here.’

  ‘What did you do, pre-3War?’

  ‘I was an economist with the World Bank.’

  ‘Oh, God …’

  ‘Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t be positive, but I don’t apologize. I’d go back there if I could. You may not have liked the World Bank –’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘– but it was a lot more democratic than MORE.’

  ‘Maybe …’

  ‘For whatever reason, let’s just say that I’m trying to put the world to rights. Meanwhile, go through that door and you’ll find your robot. We’ve done you a big favour – we’re letting you go home.’

  ‘Is this a police state?’

  ‘Let’s just say we have our own security to think about now.’

  He was gone. I knocked at the door. One of the girls opened it. She was naked. She was gorgeous.

  The room inside was white leather. Walls, ceiling, sofas, floor. There was a corner bar padded in white leather, with two chunky leather bar stools rubbing against it. In the corner there was a leather polar bear, and hanging from the ceiling a leather spider in a leather web. Leather bowls were filled with non-leather peanuts, and on the leather-top table were a tin of sardines and a fork with a leather handle.

  I must have looked taken aback. The girl smiled and said, ‘World of Leather’.

  ‘Yes’, I said, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that’s where we got it all. It was their display showroom. We just dragged it all over here and cleaned it up.’

  I had to think about this. It was easy, after the bomb, to take what you wanted from the blown-apart shops, but few people did because where would you take the stuff? Possessions are not relevant if you have nowhere to put them. If there had been a shop selling roofs and walls and drainage – maybe.

  ‘We were some of the first in Wreck City,’ she said. ‘We are part of the Alternative.’

  ‘The Alternative?’

  ‘Pre-War we were in a squat escaping from the expectations of our families. Post-3War, we’re here. Do you want a drink? We’ve only got champagne.’

  ‘Did you drag that here as well?’

  ‘Yes – we found an open cellar underneath the Bank of England. It was just racks and racks of champagne. Look …’

  She took me to a leather door in the leather wall and opened it. Behind was a junk room, filled floor to ceiling with champagne bottles – not stacked or racked, just thrown in.

  ‘We recycle all the glass,’ she said. ‘There’s a really good recycling unit here. Nothing gets wasted.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it’, I said.

  She got out a bottle – Veuve Clicquot 1995.
‘Is this one OK? We like it better than the Bollinger.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it will be lovely. Thank you very much.’ When I am nervous or unsure, I cover it up with excessive good manners. I have not had any practice at unexpected drinks with unexpected strangers – naked.

  I told her my name.

  She said, ‘So, are you in a relationship, Billie?’

  I thought this was an odd question from someone I had just met – but, then, everything about here was odd, so instead of saying, ‘What’s that to you? Where’s my robot?’ I answered no, but I had been, more than once, but that nothing had finally worked out.

  ‘Are you sorry about that?’

  I said I was sorry about that, but since the War it had been the last thing on my mind. I wanted to say that one of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things that a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urge adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death. Death is what war is good at.

  And so, when the telegram has been read, and the statesmen and generals have said something about sad loss and turned and gone back to higher stakes than a body and a few broken hearts, in that silent, empty space, to one person at least, it is clear that the personal is everything.

  ‘We are founding an alternative community’, said Alaska, for that was her name, perhaps to match the colour code.

  ‘Founded on bottles of champagne and white leather?’

  ‘These things are temporary’, she said. ‘It’s what we could find at the time, along with the sardines.’

  ‘Sardines?’

  ‘Two containerloads of sardines in olive oil. That is, one million tins.’

  I was thinking about the Pilgrim Fathers, setting sail in the Mayflower in 1620. They were going to found an alternative community, and who is to say that Bibles, axes, ropes, flour and salt pork are a better basis for a new way of life than white leather, champagne and sardines?