Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (42 page)

But despite a sufficiency of food and the double luxury of sex that had generated love, the outside world could not wholly be ignored. The autumn
was deepening, the days were growing shorter, Liz was getting more frequent nightmares about Jane, the odds against survival were steadily lengthening, and across a few yards of water the village of Ambergreave lay mute, stinking and desolate – a constant reminder that what had happened yesterday would probably be repeated with variations tomorrow. Mankind, or what was left of it, had turned cannibal just as much as the pigs and the rats. The surviving transies were living off the past and off each other. And because of this they were clearly doomed. Sooner or later their numbers would become critically low; and then, no doubt, man would join the dodo and the phoenix to become a legend in a world where there was no one to take any notice of legends.

Left to his own devices, Greville might have been content to live from day to day, taking each day as it came, merely thankful for another twenty-four hours of grace. But there was Francis. And if Greville had been tempted ever to regard his island as a kind of shabby Eden, Francis would most certainly have been cast for the role of serpent.

‘You know,’ said Francis one afternoon when they were sitting out of doors, enjoying an hour of late sunlight, ‘what saddens me most is that there probably aren’t enough people left to care.’

‘To care about what?’ asked Greville. He was watching Liz pluck a chicken – one that had signed its own death warrant by refusing to lay – and he was marvelling that it was possible to turn such a mundane act as plucking a chicken into a sequence of movements that had grace, charm and an oddly symbolic kind of promise.

‘About the future of man,’ said Francis sombrely. ‘It’s easy to care about individual futures, easiest of all to care about our own. But it’s damned difficult to care about an abstraction … It’s such a pity, really. We spent about half a million years growing self-consciousness, language and conceptual thought. Then we spent another half million years learning what to do with them. Then the sun gets an itch in its belly, the irritation gets radiated across a hundred million miles of space and triggers off the death-wish in three thousand million creatures, each of whom is potentially greater than the sun simply because the sun can neither laugh nor cry.’

Greville, absorbed in Liz, who was absorbed in the chicken, had only been listening vaguely.

‘There are still a few people left who can laugh and cry,’ he said.

Francis sighed. ‘Yes, but can any of them care? Can any of them really care? Do any of them want to care? I’m just a tired old man full of worn out paranoia and I would like to feel that somewhere somebody cared.’

‘Why?’ asked Greville.

‘So that an ape with a soul that gibbered for the moon and died with a tool in its hand will not have died in vain. I’m a romantic, I know, but this is an
ignominious way for mankind to go out. Better to have had the sun turn into a nova, better to have died to a man of some insidious and unconquerable disease. Better even to have blown ourselves to glory for the sake of, ideas … But not like this. It’s so futile, so untidy.’

‘Yes,’ said Greville bitterly. ‘We had a great civilisation. We had nuclear weapons, bacteriological warfare and brain-washing. One-third of us developed heart diseases from overeating and two thirds of us developed other diseases from malnutrition. It was a hell of a civilisation! We had hot lines from Washington and London to Moscow and Peking. But there weren’t any hot lines from the slums of Bombay to New York. You could have your nose reshaped or your double chin removed for a mere five hundred pounds at the London Clinic, but in Central Africa we let them die of beriberi, malaria, leprosy and plain hunger for free.’

Francis smiled. ‘Dear lad, for a transie you are beginning to sound abnormally normal … Of course there was injustice. Of course there was tyranny and fear and tremendous waste. And what do you think the answer could have been? Communism, Utopianism, humanism or any other -ism? Well I can tell you that -isms never got anybody anywhere. The moment you have an -ism you begin to freeze ideas. Orthodoxy evolves into tyranny, and then you are back to – what was the phrase? – square one. No, Greville, my friend; what humanity needed was simply time. Another ten thousand years of it. Not much to ask, really, from a cosmic point of view. But the sun had indigestion, and here we are. I suppose it’s funny, in a way, but my sense of humour isn’t what it was.’

Greville was enjoying the argument. He knew it was going nowhere, because there was nowhere for it to go. But he was enjoying it. He had not endeavoured to solve the problems of the world for nearly twenty years, and now that they were past solving he felt he could almost achieve an Olympian detachment. There were no problems to solve now – apart from the ordinary personal ones. All that remained was to render a verdict.

‘Humanity,’ he said, ‘wasn’t worth another ten thousand years. It was rotten.’

Francis, too, was enjoying himself. It was a long time since he had held a tutorial. ‘So Beethoven was rotten?

And Buddha and Leonardo da Vinci, and Socrates, and – coming a bit nearer home – Dag Hammarskjold and Albert Schweitzer?’

Greville laughed. ‘Transies,’ he said, ‘crazy mixed-up transies. They suffered from delusions of grandeur – and so did Attila, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin … And even Jesus Christ … Transies all … Exceedingly dangerous specimens in a world of latterday apes.’

Francis permitted himself a display of indignation that he did not actually feel. ‘The trouble with you is that you are afraid to admit what has been lost. You are afraid of admitting anything because if you did it would move you to
tears … Yes, we butchered people in the twentieth century as we butchered them throughout history. We butchered their minds and bodies. But at the same time sight was being restored to the blind, hearing to the deaf, limbs to the disfigured or the malformed. We could make one voice heard across the planet, one orchestra could play to three continents. We could set down thinking machines on the face of the moon. What we lost when the sun decided to have celestial hiccoughs was not so much a few thousand million people as a vision of greatness … We could have been great, you know. In time we could even have been great enough to enter the mind of God.’

‘Now I know why you survived,’ retorted Greville. ‘You’re just another frustrated bloody saviour. You lived in a little academic world and did crosswords with the Almighty and didn’t have erections because you thought they were just a shade uncouth. You’re just an ape with a computer complex. You think that because you’ve got a few million grey cells sitting on top of your spine you’re more special than a tree. How the hell do you know that a tree isn’t more perfectly designed to enter what you grandly call the mind of God?’

‘Because,’ said Francis, ‘a tree is never more than a tree. But there have been moments when men have been greater than man … The perennial ape I grant you. Grant me in return a few concepts that could have justified the existence of life on this burnt-out cinder whirling stupidly round a dyspeptic star.’

‘Hot or cold?’ inquired Liz. She had finished plucking the chicken, and it was her first contribution to the conversation.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Francis.

‘I said: hot or cold?’

‘We are temporarily deserting the mind of God to consider the future of a dead chicken,’ explained Greville drily. ‘Liz is less intellectual than practical. You and I may discuss the now theoretical potential of mankind, but she will see that our bellies are filled while we are doing it. She is also good for sexual solace, and that, more than anything, keeps away the eternal cold.’

Liz surveyed them both. ‘A woman gave birth to each of you,’ she said. ‘I expect it was a pretty energetic process. Let’s hope the original screw was more satisfying than the end product … Now, hot or cold?’

‘Hot,’ said Francs.

‘Cold,’ said Greville.

Liz grinned. ‘You’re both a couple of liars.’ She picked up the chicken and took it into the house.

Greville watched her go, and felt his heart ache.

Francis watched Greville. ‘She’s right, you know. We are a couple of liars. You don’t believe what you say any more than I do.’ Then he could not resist adding a trifle maliciously, ‘On the other hand, it appears there are still a few things that have not been lost.’

Extract from Greville’s diary:

‘October. Day ninety – a piece of precision I allow myself as a slight luxury. It’s not accurate, of course. I never stick at any damn thing, even the memoirs of a semi-retired grave-digger.

‘Francis is dead. He wasn’t with us long enough to matter. And yet he mattered. What was it about him? He was just another sad, lonely creature, an absurd old man with a headful of abstractions and three-syllable words. He wasn’t programmed for survival. He was even too stupid to look after himself properly. He would go for days without washing. If Liz hadn’t forced a minimum routine of hygiene on him he would have worn all his clothes until they stank – or fell off in rags. He was lazy, he was impractical, he was pompous. And yet … And yet I liked him. Why the hell should I feel so affectionate for somebody who was so absurd? My trouble is that I’m learning how to care. It’s dangerous.

‘Francis was absurd enough to die absurdly for an absurd reason. Or maybe there were two reasons. Because I shall never know whether he died for the Concise Oxford Dictionary or for a half-starved boy in cat skins. I suppose it was my fault, really. I shouldn’t have indulged him. After all, what was he? Nothing more than a piece of human wreckage that Liz persuaded me to save against my better judgement.

‘All right, Greville, my lad! Make like God! Offer your divine verdict on one more machine that failed!

‘The truth is there is no verdict to be offered upon Francis, except the customary open verdict. I liked him, that’s all.

‘It happened on a scrounging expedition. Liz and I had the usual kind of shopping list – food, clothes, guns, ammunition, petrol, paraffin. But all Francis wanted was books. I told him there would probably be no time left to look for books, but he wanted to come anyway. He probably had a theory he could persuade me to make time. He succeeded – and died.

‘We’d had quite a bit of luck, really, The car was running well, the roads we chose (or what was left of them) didn’t have any nasty surprises, and the weather was fine. I determined to avoid towns and villages as much as possible. Isolated houses, preferably large ones – and preferably uninhabited – were the main targets. We didn’t want to fight anybody. We just wanted loot. But if it came to fighting, we were as prepared as we could be: one rifle, one revolver
and two shotguns. We weren’t too badly off for ammunition, since I’d found a little in what the Brothers of Iniquity had left of Ambergreave.

‘The first couple of houses that we tried had been picked clean as a bone. The third one was inhabited, and we were lucky enough to be able to reverse the car and get the hell out of it before the shooting became accurate. But the fourth house was a gold mine. It was difficult to understand why someone had not cleaned it out before us. Maybe it was too secluded. We only discovered it by accident. Liz spotted what looked like a narrow track leading into a wood; and there at the end of it was the house.

‘Our total haul was three pairs of trousers, five shirts, several blankets, a couple of evening gowns (circa 1960), a dozen or so unlabelled tins (later we found they all contained fruit juice), a couple of oil lamps, various woodworking tools and about six or seven gallons of paraffin at the bottom of a forty-gallon drum. Fortunately we had brought a couple of empty five-gallon cans with us.

‘The next house we found was even better. It was nearby and had probably once been a gamekeeper’s cottage. There we got a rusty shotgun, a box of candles, a large jar of pickled onions, two small jars of jam, three boxes of matches (damp, but they were all right when we dried them out), an old sheepskin jacket and about a hundred pounds of flour. The flour had been stored in earthenware jars – God knows how long – but it was still fresh and dry. It was the jackpot.

‘Francis helped us load all our spoils in the station wagon and said casually: “How about going back by Bury St. Edmunds? It’s the shorter route.”

‘ “Too dangerous,” I said. “I don’t like towns, these days. We’ll go back the way we came. Then we’ll have no trouble.”

‘ “There’s a public library in Bury,” said Francis diffidently. “There may still be a few interesting books left.”

‘ “Fuck the books. You can’t eat them.”

‘Francis sighed. “Metaphorically, one can, of course. That’s what books are for.”

‘Surprisingly, Liz supported Francis. But I overruled the pair of them. We set off back the way we came. We weren’t so lucky on the way back. We hit a road block.

‘Maybe the people who manned it had heard us go through the first time and guessed that we were on a scrounging expedition. Or maybe they just set up blocks at random intervals.

‘The block in this case was nothing more than a very old tractor that more or less filled the narrow lane. Whoever set it up had chosen a bad place because although it was round a bend, I still had about twenty-five yards’ warning. Enough to stop the car, reverse it round the bend and make a turn of sorts. We got away even before the shooting started.

‘But, to the delight of Francis, the only alternative route back to Ambergreave that I knew led through Bury St. Edmunds. It was late afternoon. Soon it would be dusk. I thought the risk was worth taking.

‘There was no trouble in the outskirts of Bury. It seemed like a ghost town. We drove on until we came to the market square. Still no trouble.

‘And there was the public library, and here was Francis in the car, pining for a few miserable books.

‘ “Give me five minutes – only five minutes,” he pleaded. “Man does not live by bread alone. Besides, the whole place is deserted. Who in their right minds would want to live here?”

‘I was inclined to agree with him. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to park in the middle of the square so that if anybody wants to shoot they’ll have to shoot from a distance. I’m not going to get out of the car and neither is Liz. We’ll cover you as well as we can, but you’d better make it quick.”