0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (15 page)

'Thanks for the offer,' he mumbled, rebuttoning his coat. 'I'll keep it in mind.' Moving in meant being a part of the professor's ever-changing extended family, which meant looking after sick kids and hysterical, gangrenous parents.

'Shari will be sorry she missed you.'

I'll bet, he thought. He was suspicious of Shari since the accident; she was too nice to him now. 'Say hi to her for me.' He waved to Mrs Quintero as he pushed against the exit door.

Outside, the rising wind drove the temperature still lower. He reached the bottom of the slope below the supermarket and saw what he initially took to be a pile of brown rags, but closer inspection revealed a rigid hand, its fingers clutching the gelid air as if trying to take hold on life itself.

Crystals of ice had formed over the corpse's eyes like luxuriant cataracts.

Kallie cracked open its jacket and felt around for his wallet, but found nothing. Bennett had either dropped it in his drunken stupor, or had been robbed.

He knelt and bowed his head for a moment. No prayer, just a few seconds of stillness. They had spent their childhood years together; he owed Bennett something. Then he rose and continued on his way.

On a suicidal impulse he decided to push further on into the city centre, something he had not done for over four years. He wanted to see the River Thames, to prove for himself that this life-channel, more ancient than the pre-Christian city that had grown on its banks, still existed. It meant he would be trapped there overnight, because it would take him until sunset just to reach Piccadilly Circus, and it was virtually impossible to travel alone after dark without being very well prepared. Still, he wanted to see Eros once more. See it, perhaps, one last time.

As he passed the cylindrical ruin of the Telecom Tower, he thought of Shari; how she had been passing him somewhere near here on her way back to the supermarket, and how the Red Cross van had swung wildly around the corner. He remembered the lethal guillotine of ice sliding from its roof in a broad oblong sheet, and how he had thrown himself at her with a shout, slamming her body to the pavement as the ice shattered above their heads. It was the first time he had touched a girl. Up until then, the thought of physical contact with anyone had made him shudder uncontrollably. Shari had hugged him tight, clinging to the life she had nearly lost. Kallie had gently disentangled himself, embarrassed. He had shunned her ever since.

The freezing wind sucked at his greatcoat as he waded knee-deep through the intersection at Charlotte Street. His right foot had gone numb; a dangerous sign, one which suggested he should at least find a warm place to rest up for a few minutes. But there was nothing open around here. He continued past the shuttered, padlocked stores, concentrating on reaching Leicester Square and the circus beyond, unable to afford the luxury of worrying about his safety. Without realising it, he had reached a decision. The river was no longer just a point in his journey, but the point of the journey. After arriving there he felt sure he would have no need of further goals.

In Rathbone Place he passed a dying dog, a red setter, half buried in an avalanche of dislodged ice. The shards that sparkled in its diamante fur lent it an air of ostentatious glamour.

Oxford Street. Once a cheap-and-cheerful marketplace thronged with shoppers, according to his father. Now a wind-ravaged tunnel of ice, black-spotted in places where the corpses of foolhardy pedestrians poked up through the snowdrifts. No life here at all. It was worse than he had feared. The blizzard cleared for a moment, and as if through flawed crystal he glimpsed two ragged figures roped together, struggling to stay upright, in trouble. They had disappeared in the fifteen minutes it took him to reach the spot they had occupied. Already their footprints were obliterated.

Soho was impassable. The narrow streets were blocked with abandoned trucks and boulders created by the sheet-ice that slid continuously from the rooftops. The upper floors were skeined with billowing crosshairs of ice that caught the dying light like the wings of giant dragonflies.

Kallie skirted around into Regent Street, the great curve of Nash's terrace pockmarked by the blown-in windows of department stores. The pale sun had descended behind the buildings as he reached the blue-shadowed end of the street. Here the wind was at its fiercest. A red double-decker Routemaster bus lay on its side, almost buried by drifts. A diamond shop had lost its panes, the ground floor now extravagantly filled with iridescent icicles, so that it appeared little changed from its window-dressed heyday.

The snow in the circus was sullied by the discharges of overturned trucks and the tracks of pilgrims who had come here in the vain hope that reaching this gaudy apex of civilisation might somehow end their own spiritual loss. As man descended once more into beast, the manufactured tokens of a forgotten sophisticated world took on the power of talismen.

Kallie watched as an elderly woman floundered past with a green plastic Harrods bag on her head. Earlier that day, at Mornington Crescent, he had seen two young men dragging an electronic exercise machine toward the tube station, perhaps intending to install it as an object of veneration.

And here was Eros, poor Eros, intended as an inspiration to Londoners, now twisted from its perch so that only a leg and an elegant silvery wing of Gilbert's famous statue could be seen thrusting hopelessly up from the dunes in the centre of the roundabout. Kallie stood before the fallen God and grimaced in despair, heaving in gulps of stinging knife-sharp air as he stared at the upturned calf and ankle, the feathered wingtip almost lost in snow and discarded chunks of scaffolding. Then he was running at the statue, clawing at it in a desperate attempt to free it from the swamped remains of the desecrated fountain. Uncovering even another inch proved impossible. Others had tried to remove the permafrost trellis that encased it like a crystal shroud, in vain.

Kallie stumbled blindly away, tipping over into the oil-stained drifts, pushing himself back on to his feet, scrabbling around the long-abandoned traffic until he came up against the steel-shuttered doorway of Tower Records. There was nothing else for him here, and nowhere else for him to go, so he remained completely still, unable to think or move. As night fell, the warmth within him slowly faded. At his back, giant cut-outs of forgotten rock stars struck poses of defiance, icons of redundant anarchy.

Kallie started to die.

It was as easy as he had hoped it would be. You just had to do nothing, keep still and allow the insidious numbness to colonise your limbs. The crawling clouds reflected the whiteness of the city, and finally ceased to move, as if the world could no longer be bothered to turn upon its axis. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the ice-jewelled shutters, allowing life to quietly slip away.

The explosion of noise that followed blasted him to his feet.

Somebody was playing music inside the building. He could feel the bass tones vibrating the windowpanes. Forcing his reluctant body into action he stepped back, trying to see beyond the reflections into the rear of the ground floor. Someone - some
thing
- was gyrating insanely to the music, raging the entire length of the store. And there were lights, bursts of primary colour, flashing sequentially.

It took him a while to discover the forced door of the delivery bay at the side of the building. He climbed over buckled steel struts - they must have been rammed with a vehicle - to the interior, and was deafened by the surrounding, saturating noise. Someone had used a bright yellow forklift truck to break in. Piles of cracked and broken CD cases littered the floor. A primitive set of disco lights pulsed red and blue diamonds at the back of the floor near the stairwell. The dancer was a short, slim woman in her forties. Her body retained the litheness and aggression of a professional performer. She swung and slammed and span, kicking out, punching the chill air with a series of guttural grunts. Her greying red hair was tied back with a green bandana. She wore a red satin leotard with the leggings hacked off above the knee, and a yellow scarf carelessly knotted around her waist. She looked ablaze with anger and energy.

Kallie dropped behind a record rack and watched as the music changed, from the techno-trance of The Shamen to the electronic heartbeat of Tangerine Dream, from the calypso rhythms of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra to the classical cadences of Michael Nyman. She danced through an eclectic melange of sound that comfortably encompassed Offenbach and Elton John. Now that there was no more culture, the abrupt changes did not shock. When the music ceased in midtrack she crossed to the DJ booth and flipped the tape - obviously an item she had personally assembled - so that she could continue to dance. The first track of the second side was 'We're Havin' a Heatwave', sung by Marilyn Monroe, and Kallie caught himself grinning uncontrollably. Wondering where the power was coming from, he searched the floor and saw that a pair of car batteries had been rigged to the system with jump leads.

Now he was able to observe her properly for the first time, bent over the light in the booth, feeling for the controls. She was unable to see, permanently blinded by time spent lost in the snowy wastes. There were no forgers at all on her swollen right hand, and just two on her left. She had deftly flipped the tape with her thumbs. He tried to catch sight of her feet, dreading to imagine their damaged state, knowing that every step she took must be agonising, but she was already off and away, pounding across the floor to the brassy orchestrations.

Finally, even the deafening music failed to keep him awake.

Comforted by the great weight of sound, with his greatcoat pulled about his head, he slept on through the long, loud night.

He awoke soon after dawn to find the store silent, the lights and the sound system turned off to conserve what little power there was left. The dancer was asleep on a patchwork duvet beside the DJ booth, snoring lightly. Studying her, he was tempted to think that the tiny crosshatched lines around her mouth and eyes were caused by laughter, not fear, even though he saw that her feet were little more than swollen stumps. For a moment he wanted to ask her how she could dance in the face of all reason, when the world and her own body were steadily failing her, how it was possible to experience pleasure without hope. But waking her up, he realised, would be a mistake. Better to let her sleep on, and rebuild her energy for another dance.

Gingerly stepping between CD cases, he made his way back to the delivery bay door and left. Outside, he paused before the windows and looked back in, but could no longer see her. The floor was still and dark, as if the building would only reawaken when she did.

The sky had cleared to a deep sapphire-hard blue and the wind was keen, but at least the snow had stopped. He passed several people on his way to the river, but none of them were prepared to acknowledge him, or even look up. For the first time he began to sense just how completely the cold had closed him, closed them all, off. He was aware of being hungry, a state he normally never noticed, and grew colder by the minute, but the shimmering ebony band ahead drove him forward along the half-buried embankment, until he was standing in the silent centre of Waterloo Bridge, above the strangled stream that had once been the mighty Thames.

When he looked down into the spangled black water and saw that it still ran, determinedly chugging around the encrusted floes and over mounds of industrial debris, on through the heart of the city, he began to cry; lightly at first, then uncontrollably, great howls of despair that turned to roars of frustration, rage and joy. Ice formed on his face where the tears coagulated. Something inside him opened, fanning into faint life, slowly growing warmer until his gut was burning. He turned and bellowed from the bridge, out across the sub-zero city, up into the frozen sky where hardy white gulls still wheeled and screamed, yelling until he was hoarse and dizzy from the exertion.

And as that first great release subsided, he knew; that hope was false, a misleading hollow nonsense obscuring all that was real and true. The truth was that the world would die and take him with it, today, tomorrow, years from now, in agony, in terror, in unreadiness, and it didn't matter.

What mattered was the time left to live. His rumbling stomach broke his train of thought, and he yelped with the shock of the noise after so much silence.

Kallie looked out across the glittering, foolish river, to the weakling sun climbing in a pointless sky, where a dancing madwoman whirled in scraps of fire on crippled feet, beyond the laws of gravity, the threshold of pain, the bounds of rationality. He removed a glove and wiped his eyes until they were clear and dry. Heavy grey snowclouds were amassing on the estuary horizon. It was time to head North, before the temperature fell further.

He wondered what Shari was doing, and whether, in the face of all reason, she too was laughing.

WAGE SLAVES

The office block blotted out the night sky above Canary Wharf. Walls of polished black glass absorbed all reflections, turning the building into a black hole, inhuman and infinite. The surrounding streets were deserted.

At this time of night a single window was still illuminated, on the 35th floor.

Leonard Clark was in his office studying a document. He was a lifer, heavy, balding, gym-fit, a workaholic whose calculated responses and unflinching stares made others nervous. His office was clinically corporate. The only touches of humanity were a framed photograph of a lost-looking wife and a signed cricket bat - a quota-achievement trophy -

mounted on the wall.

Matthew Felix knocked and entered. Another executive, but one with an attitude as yet unhardened by the vicissitudes of business life.

'Ah, Mr Felix. I've just finished checking your report. Take a pew.'

The younger man seated himself and awaited Clark's verdict. 'The style is sharp, succinct,' noted his boss. 'It's very impressive.
Very
impressive.' He paced about, studying the document while Felix fidgeted, unnerved by the rare praise.