Bar None (12 page)

This exit ramp rises to a roundabout above the motorway, and at the top of the ramp there's a knot of cars tied together by the ghost of a terrible fire. Their shells have been melted into grotesque shapes, spiked ribs and metallic spines that look for all the world like the skeletons of living things. I can squeeze by, just, and as I use my feet to guide the motorbike through the narrowest of gaps, that guilt punches in again.

I can't look back. I hear the Range Rovers stop, the doors open, voices calling out in confusion and dismay, and I can't look back.

I pause, leaning to one side to support the bike. "My house!" I call. "I have to see. Just to make sure. To make certain my certainty. You understand?"

"No!" the Irishman says. "You're a fucking idiot, and I don't understand a word!"

"I understand," Jacqueline says. I still can't turn, but I smile. And I really believe she does.

"You'll get yourself killed!" Jessica shouts.

Cordell joins in. "The city's not safe, you know that, Michael told us, everything's wrong and rotten and . . ."

"Give him half an hour," Jacqueline says. "Please?"

"Half an hour," I shout. Without waiting for a reply—a yes or a no—I rev the bike and move away.

And I don't, I
can't
, look back.

I'm not sure what I expected. Streets filled with marauding zombies, maybe. The hate-filled dead rising up at my impertinence, clawing their way through closed wooden doors, rising from hastily dug graves, reaching for me with nails crusted with the dried blood of older victims. Or groups of pet dogs gone feral, Alsatians leading packs of corgis, a King Labrador ruling over a domain of vicious poodles, terriers and spaniels. Maybe I'd expected to see half the town in ruins, fallen victim to pyromaniacs and vandals since society's rapid decline. All the clichés.

But I see none of these. There is damage, of course, and plenty of signs that things are not right. The first row of houses lining Caermaen Road is scarred by a rubble-filled gap, as though time has punched out one of the town's teeth. Gas explosion, I guess. Front gardens have gone wild, carefully maintained borders swallowed by tangle root, and lawns are lush and heavy. And here and there, the remains of bodies.

The main impression I get as I ride closer to my old house is that everyone has gone away, and what they left behind will take its time to die. This is what Armageddon has always looked like in my mind's eye. It means the end of humanity, not the end of the world. I'd dreamed this once as a teenager: an empty world, humanity gone or been taken, and its roads and paths, rooms and gardens slowly being overtaken by nature once again. In five years there will be no sign of these carefully maintained gardens. Ten years from now the roads and pavements will be turned crazy by roots and shoots breaking through from below. In twenty years some of the roofs will fail, forty years walls will fall, and a century from now this will be a forgotten city. Animals will own it once again. There will be rooms that survive, and places where the stain of humanity will take much longer to be cleaned away. But it won't take forever.

It's sad, but I can't help thinking of it as something of a triumph.

Maybe I really am mad
, I think, and then I turn the corner into my own cul-de-sac.

Memories rush in. In all of them Ashley is a presence but not an image.

"Be there," I say, but there's no way she can. Even if the grey area of my memory
is
fooling me, and she
didn't
die, there would be no reason for her to remain in our home. There had been none for me.

"I left because you were dead," I say. I switch off the bike and kick down the stand. The silence is shattering. The last revs echo away between houses and back along the street, and then I am in a silence broken only by the breath of the wind. There are birds, but they sing in the distance. I guess that anything nearby has been shocked into muteness by my appearance.

I remain motionless, breathing as gently as fear and anticipation will allow, until the birds start singing again. They flit from roof to roof, disappearing into eaves and through the eyes of smashed windows. They bring life to this place, and I hope, I pray, that they're an omen.

"I'm a fool," I say. "I saw her die." But I imagine a last-minute panic, Ashley leaving to find her mother on the other side of the city while I stayed behind, and that scenario suddenly seems just as likely. I remember none of it . . . but it has the power of possibility. "A damn fool."

I walk toward the house. It looks just as overgrown and abandoned as all the others. Of course it does; if she was still here, she wouldn't want to advertise the fact. Maybe there are many people still at home . . . letting the grass grow, the plants make a tangle of their garden . . . awaiting someone like me to come and rescue them from the certainty of their deaths.

The front door is closed, as I had left it. Empty milk bottles stand in their wire cage, awaiting collection. I shade the glass in the door and press my face to it. Inside seems quiet, undisturbed, and wholly alien to me.

I knock, smile, shake my head, and force the door open with three hefty kicks. It rebounds from the hall wall and I hold it open. The house is silent. "It's me," I say. There's no answer.

I don't know this place. There are pictures on the wall that I remember buying, but they're strange to me now. The painted hall wall had taken me two whole weekends to finish, but it's as if this is the first time I've seen it. The air of the house, the space, is all wrong, and I cannot find it in myself to know it as home.

I step over the threshold and head for the stairs. I have no desire to see the rest of the house, because there's nothing here for me. Only the bedroom. That's where I remember leaving Ashley's corpse because I could not face burying her. So if my memory is not lying, if I'm not quite as mad as I think, if she really is dead . . . that's where she will be.

I climb thirteen stairs and stop on the landing. There's a smell. It's not rot or decay, isn't even that unpleasant. Maybe it's just the aroma of a house that has been locked up for six months with no ventilation. Even a home has to breathe.

Kidding myself
, I think.
That's Ashley I smell, or what's left of her. Do I really need to see?

And of course, I do.

I walk forward, pass the bathroom door, the spare bedroom, and stand before our bedroom door. Suddenly there is a rush of memory, so intense and raw that I sway and hold onto the banister to prevent myself from falling. A scratch on the door from when we moved in our new bed. A pluck at the corner of the landing carpet where I hadn't fitted it quite right, and the vacuum cleaner kept snagging it. A splash of paint on the skirting to the right of the door, from when I was decorating the walls; I'd always intended cleaning it off. Every memory involved Ashley's presence, but none of them involved
her
, as a visible, touchable entity. Still she is so far away from me, and on the other side of a door.

"Well, standing here won't solve anything," I say. "Ash, I'm coming in."

I push open the door. And there she is.

A few minutes later, sitting in the street beyond my front garden, wallowing in memories of Ashley that are all mine, I see the first of the shapes milling at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. I think it's Cordell and I stand to wave, but then other shapes join the first, moving cautiously or awkwardly into the street, and I know that I'm in trouble.

So here they are. The zombie hordes, the survivors turned to cannibalism, the gang ruled by a sadistic ex-military man intent on gaining control of the nothing that's left. Here is the Armageddon I imagined as a child. And for a moment, content in remembering Ashley without having to drink to see her beautiful face once again, I really don't care.

Ashley was crying again, her hair catching the glow of sunlight through the open window blinds, and this would be one of the days of my life. I went to her and held her as I always did at times like this. And as always, there was nothing I could say.

Later, we drove out into the country to one of our favourite pubs. We listened to Thin Lizzy on the stereo, their classic
Live and Dangerous
album, and we were both silent as Lynott gave his perfect rendition of "Still in Love with You." Our windows were down, our spirits rising, and Ashley rested her hand on my thigh as I drove. I touched the back of her hand now and then, but the country lanes were narrow and twisty, and I spent a lot of time changing gears.

When we reached the pub and parked, Ashley turned to me and said, "Everything's going to be all right." She smiled. And even though her eyes were still rimmed red from crying, I believed her.

It was cool, but we kept our jackets on and sat outside, listening to the tinkle of their old water feature. There was a main road half a mile away and the background hum of traffic was constant, but it still felt quite peaceful here. It was early evening, so there weren't many customers yet. We had a corner of the garden to ourselves.

Ashley went in to buy a drink, and she came out with two bottles of Black Sheep Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale and pint glasses. I smiled, but my stomach fell. A novelty beer such as this surely couldn't taste very good.

I was wrong. It was a nice pint—pale amber, light and fruity, subtly bitter and dusty at the end—and the bottle labels gave us a laugh.

Ashley sat beside me, eschewing eye contact for the sake of closeness.

"So what are we going to do?" she asked.

"Sit here and drink some more."

She nudged me. "We have yet to toss a coin to see who's driving home."

I shrugged, looked around, let the setting sun warm my face. "Fuck it," I said. "Let's stay here and call a cab later."

"Sounds good," she said, but she drifted off and became contemplative. Ran her finger around the rim of her glass. I knew she had meant something different. "So," she said after a minute or two, "what are we going to do?"

I stroked her back. "What do you want to do?"

"We could adopt," she said.

"Really?"

"I don't know."

I took a drink and sighed. "Well, it's something to think about."

Ashley and I were very good at talking. We knew each other so well, knew how to pitch a conversation, when to start or when to stop. That evening we spent chatting about many inconsequentialities, the sort of things couples often talk about when they spend time relaxed together. Music, films, sex, food, sex, and sex. But all the while, interspersed through our casual conversation like a lifeline through an avalanche of experience, we kept coming back to the subject at hand: Ashley could not have children, and we were faced with the first real challenge of our relationship.

"I want to do you from behind later," I said.

"If you're lucky."

"If
you're
lucky."

She laughed and took a drink. "Long as you let me sit on your face first."

"Hmmm . . . that's a tough one."

She laughed again, finished her drink, tapped the glass along the tabletop and listened to the different notes it made. "Imagine a future without anything of us in it," she said. "No genes of ours. Not even any ideas. No one who'll lie awake at night and think about us, about all the good times we gave them through their childhood."

"We adopt, it still won't be our genes," I said. "It never can be."

Ashley tapped the glass harder. "Well, that's not what's important. It's memory that's important. If no one carries our memory when we die, then we really are dead."

I thought about that for a while, and I didn't like what she said. I saw the stark truth of it. No children, no fond memories of us as kind parents or doting grandparents. Our friends would remember us until they died, and perhaps their children would occasionally talk of the nice couple their mum and dad used to spend time with, nice but a little sad too. Because we would become sad, I knew. However much we loved each other and supported each other through this, we would become sad.

"So we adopt," I said.

"It's not that easy."

"There are agencies, people who help."

She looked at me and smiled, leant forward and kissed me full on the lips. "I don't mean that," she said.

I went to get more drinks, and when I came back Ashley was knelt down beside the pub's garden pond. I could see a swathe of her bare back, and the top of her thong peeked above her shorts. I handed her a glass and squatted behind her, nudging against her so she could feel how turned on I was. "Definitely from behind," I whispered, aware now that the garden was filling with patrons.

"If you're lucky," she said.

"If
you're
lucky."

We drank some more, ate a small bar snack, called a cab and went home. We were drunk, and we became quite heated in the back of the taxi. No kissing or ripping of clothes, but my hand rested at the top of her thigh, my little finger massaging between her legs and feeling the heat of her there. And half a mile from home she casually unzipped my jeans and let my erection spring free. I had to continue responding to the driver's banter as she stroked me, and when we stopped I somehow managed to get to our front door without being seen.

It was one of those days I remembered forever. But we never had children, and we never did adopt, and now so many memories are mine and mine alone.

I sit astride the bike, kick it to life and watch the shapes coming closer. There are a dozen of them. They're people, faces blank, dirty, shorn of civilisation. Their clothes are old but not too ragged, and each of them carries a strange weapon. I see no guns, but there are sharpened bed posts, umbrellas spiked with nails, a child's plastic doll embedded with rusty razor blades. It's as if these people are hefting the dead past as a weapon.

I'm unsettled, nervous, but not scared. Ashley is with me now, and she always will be. Those remains up in the bedroom are not her. By coming here I have lifted her memory away from that room of death and placed it firmly in my mind, unlocking a million doorways and leaving them ready to be opened. Whether I do that whilst alive or dead does not matter.