Empty World (8 page)

WELCOME.

A sports car was standing outside, its relatively clean windscreen evidence of recent use. Neil parked behind it, and got out. He ought to have put up a sign outside his own house, he realized. For that matter, he should have thought of something like the balloons. The inhabitant of No 34 was obviously more enterprising.

The front door was latched but not locked. He opened it and stepped into the hall. He called out:

“Hi, there! Anyone home?”

There was no reply. He had a moment's disappointment, but only that. At this time of day, he himself would have been more likely to be out than in. The stranger would have his own routine of walks and foraging.

A residue of old habits and etiquette suggested that he ought not to make himself free of someone else's house without the owner's invitation: he should
wait on the step or outside in the car. But he realized how silly that was. The old ways were gone; ownership no longer had a meaning.

All the same, his exploration was tentative. The hall, he observed, was quite tidy, and he ventured further to find a kitchen with pots neatly stacked and working surfaces much cleaner than those he had left in Princes Gate. Cupboards were well stocked with food, and a Calor gas stove had been imported into an otherwise all-electric set-up. Crates of beer stood in a pile against one wall. The whole scene had an organized look.

He went upstairs, noting that the carpet on stairs and landing had been recently swept. An open door led to a large sitting room, equally clean and with the stamp of daily use. On a desk were two piles of heavy white cartridge paper, one blank, the other consisting of pencilled sketches. They must have been done by the person living here, because they were post-Plague. That showed not only in the emptiness of the streets he had drawn, but in particular things—a shattered shop window with goods in disarray, a skeleton at a road junction. The sketches were neat and realistic, the work of a draughtsman.
Near the window, though, stood an easel, with a half-finished oil painting.
That
was a frenzy of colours and shapes; Neil could not tell what it was meant to represent.

There was a bowl with apples, something Neil had not seen for a long time. There must be an orchard nearby. The bowl stood on a table, which also held a ledger-type book. He opened it to see writing—the handwriting that had been on the card—and to recognize it as a diary. He closed it, and went on looking round the room. On the mantel an atmospheric clock spun its circular brass weight to and fro, half a minute to each spin. Someone who wanted to keep track of time, an interest he had long abandoned.

He continued with his exploration. There was a bathroom across the way, again very clean, with a ­kettle in which hot water had presumably been carried up from the kitchen. The best solution, he decided, would be for both of them to abandon their present dens—to join in finding a place where a full hot water system, perhaps central heating as well, could be run off Calor gas. He was pleased with himself for the thought: he could be enterprising as well.

The door of the next room was ajar. Neil pushed it open and saw that the curtains were drawn and it was in shadow. He saw a bed made up, the whiteness of sheets . . . then the darker vertical shadow that hung in the centre of the room. The rope was secured to an old-fashioned brass light fitting; a chair was overturned on the carpet.

He just managed to reach the bathroom before being sick.

8

A
FTERWARDS NEIL RETAINED NO RECOLLECTION
of the drive back to Princes Gate, and only a blurred impression of the evening that followed. He remembered lethargy and chill and a headache. He went early to bed, wondering if he were getting a cold.

In the morning, though his thoughts were clearer, the headache and the weariness—a leaden feeling dragging down mind and body—were still present. He had not bothered to stock up with medicines—he had been in good health so far and there was a chemist's shop within easy reach. His father had been a
great believer in massive doses of Vitamin C for aborting head-colds. He had just about made up his mind to get up and go out to get some when the thought struck him: whatever was wrong was not the common cold, or any other disease harboured by man. The whole brave company—not just the cold, but measles, chicken pox, poliomyelitis, glandular fever and the rest—had found oblivion along with the creature who for millenia had been their host and victim.

He stayed in bed all that day and most of the next. It had not been an illness at all, he realized later, but shock: arising not only from the sight of the hanging body, the head slumped to one side, but from the shattering of hopes. Along with that went a bitter awareness of the narrowness of the margin by which the hopes had failed. Hours—certainly no more than twenty-four. A watch had been ticking on the dangling wrist when he touched the cold flesh. If he had found the balloon a day sooner—if he had set out sooner from Princes Gate. . . .

Despair and self-recrimination ran their course and were superseded by another emotion: curiosity. In his mind there was the image of death, a horror that could still shock for all that he had seen since
the Plague came. He had a desperate need for something more than that. This had been a boy like himself, who had survived as he had, and tried to go on living in the deserted world. He felt he must know more about him, be able to think of him as something other than a dangling corpse.

The notion of going back there was unthinkable, but in the moment of revulsion at the thought he remembered something. Before he fled the house he had picked up the diary. It must still be in the pocket of his anorak.

• • •

Neil read it that evening, by candlelight.

The style of writing was clear, simple and neat like the sketches, and the thoughts expressed had a similar clarity. He had been in the middle of reading Daniel Defoe's “Journal of the Plague Years” when the new Plague struck; and that had decided him to keep a journal.

He had been at a boarding school in the west country which had been one of the earliest to close down and send its pupils home. And home, Neil realized with surprise, had been the place where he had found him. His father had been something to do
with shipping, and apart from his parents he had an elder brother at University and a sister who was a photographic model.

It appeared to have been a warm, close family. When disaster struck, they stayed together. They too had rejected the mass burials. His mother had died first, and they had buried her in the garden. The others had gone in their turn: he had buried his brother last. It was set down calmly, with no show of emotion.

Yet the sense of gradual but inexorable destruction was chilling. Neil compared it with his own case—the sharp numbing impact of total disaster. He saw how much less bearable the other might be; and for the first time realized how what had happened that rainy Saturday afternoon had been a shield against subsequent events. He had thought he understood the horror of it all, but it had not really been so. Certain things had made an impact—his grandparents' death and the death of Tommy and Susie in particular—but even there the pain had been blunted for him. They had been reefs looming out of a mist, with the mist rapidly closing again to obliterate them.

For Peter Cranbell on the other hand—the name
was written inside the cover of the journal—there had been a steady progression into grief and misery. A page was left blank after the entry that recorded his brother's death. The next entry stood on a page by itself:

“I want to die, but can't.”

After that the recording of events was resumed, carefully written and dated. He had fled from the stench of death to live in a tent on the Heath; but returned before the rat explosion. He had barricaded himself in for a couple of weeks when that was at its height and wrote of watching them from his window, listening to their high-pitched squeaking—eventually witnessing the carnage when they turned on one another. He had stayed inside for some time after, only venturing out again when a shortage of food forced him to do so.

Peter Cranbell, obviously, had put a lot of thought and effort into coping with the situation following the Plague. He had been more practical and methodical than Neil; more imaginative, too. That was illustrated by his scheme for sending the
balloons out. He had picked a windy day, the wind from the north-west quarter, and launched them from the top floor of the house, watching them bob away and vanish over the massed roofs of London.

The entry was dated August 29th. Neil would not have known how long ago that had been—he himself had made no attempt to keep track of dates—but for the remainder of the journal. Day followed day with brief but precise accounts of his activities. Having written of the launching of the balloons, there was no further reference to them; until the last item but one. It read:

“Two months exactly since I sent off the balloons. There is no point in thinking anyone will come now. I suppose I could try again with another batch, but I can't summon up the enthusiasm.”

In the final entry he referred, for the first time, to his sketching:

“I remember the answer some writer gave to the question: would a true writer still go
on writing, marooned on a desert island? He said probably yes, but only provided he had a guarantee the ink wouldn't fade and the hope, however slim, that some day a ship would come, bringing people who could read.

“He meant you can do without an audience but not without the hope of an audience, some time, somehow. I took my sketch pad with me as usual when I went for a walk this morning, but brought it back unopened. There's no point in going on drawing things.

“There's no point in going on.”

Neil closed the book, and sat looking at it. Peter Cranbell had organized his new life efficiently—much more efficiently than Neil had done. The candle flames flickered in a draught from a crack in the window he had been meaning to see to for more than a week. Peter Cranbell would have fixed it. Peter Cranbell, for that matter, had not made do with candles: he had found lamps, and oil to burn in them.

Then, with the same calm efficiency, he had decided the life he had organized was not worth
continuing; and had practically set about organizing his death.

Neil looked up with a shudder at the light fitting above his head. The rope carefully noosed round the neck, the chair kicked away . . . he could never nerve himself for that. But there were other, easier methods. A chemist's shop—finding the pills and swallowing them, and just going to sleep. He felt very tired and the idea of sleep was attractive—sleep going on and on, with no new days of loneliness to face. He stumbled towards his bed, pulling off his clothes and dropping them as he went.

He slept heavily and woke in the morning with a sense of depression that at first had no particular focus. It was a moment or two before he remembered Peter Cranbell, and the resolve he had reached, or thought he reached. In the grey light he saw his clothes scattered on the floor, where he had let them fall. Peter Cranbell, he thought, would have hung them up tidily, however tired he was.

Neil stretched his arms, yawning. The feeling of gloom lifted. His life was much less orderly than the other's had been, but perhaps for that reason he had not come to the end of its resources—to the final
loss of hope. The chemist's shop, at any rate, had lost its attraction.

He went out to wash, and found himself whistling. He stopped, thinking of Peter Cranbell; then shrugged and continued.

• • •

Neil settled back into his usual habits as the days passed. He had vague intentions of doing something constructive, such as sending out message-balloons of his own or fixing a banner in front of the house or at some salient point nearby. He thought, too, of keeping a beacon fire going in the street, or out in the park.

In the end he did nothing. He told himself it was because they were all futile exercises—neither balloons nor banner had worked for Peter Cranbell, and as far as a beacon was concerned it would not be likely to attract attention, anyway. There was usually smoke rising somewhere on the horizon from some self-engendered fire.

But the real reason, as he finally admitted, was that to do anything would be to set hope in motion again, and he could not bear the thought of disillusionment. It was not that he believed any longer that
he was a sole survivor. If three had come through, why not thirty—or three hundred? But of the two he had found, one had been mad and the second dead. He had a strange feeling, a kind of fear of what might come of a third encounter.

When he first settled in Princes Gate he had several times gone foraging in Harrods. Subsequently he had started going the other way, towards Kensington High Street, and as with other aspects of his life the tendency had fixed into a routine. He had not been near the huge department store for over a month when he decided, one brisk chilly morning, to revisit it.

He had the Food department as his main objective, but did not go there right away. He went up the motionless escalator to the first floor, beaming a torch ahead of him, and headed south through Furnishings. Some of the furniture looked attractive: a leather sofa, in particular, would have made a useful addition to his sitting room. But he could not have lifted it single-handed, let alone transported it. A small armchair he did lift, and decided he could have carried it with some effort. He put it down again: not worth the trouble.

He went through to Books, his torch picking out rows of volumes gathering dust. He propped the torch on a table and picked out one or two books at random.
Politics for the Ordinary Citizen; Every Man His Own Lawyer. . . .
Neil let them drop on the floor.
The Can-Opener Cook
was more to the point: he put that in his haversack.

And then shelf after shelf of novels—people's imaginings about other people, processed through elaborate systems of production for yet other people to read. A section was headed Science-Fiction: hundreds and hundreds of exciting futures for the human race. All boiled down to one. Or rather, none. But he supposed if one looked at it from a more detached viewpoint there were compensations. All those forests, for instance, which no longer needed to be destroyed to make paper.

In the Pet Shop he saw displays of food, dog chews and catnips, baskets and rubber balls and vitamins, brushes and combs and shampoos, leads and chains and training whistles. The dogs, swept out by the rats, were beginning to come back: a pack of a dozen or so had run snarling past his house the previous day. They looked wilder than the ones he had
seen immediately following the Plague. He doubted if a training whistle would have much effect on them.

He entered a vast room in which the swinging beam flashed from screen to blank screen. Television sets. And elaborate and massive sound reproduction systems ranged along the sides. Neil went through to the pianos, solider and more friendly shapes, a score or more stretching away into the darkness. He remembered winter evenings, and the sound of Amanda's practising floating up through the house while he did his prep. He found one open, and strummed the keys idly: the notes soared and died. He had started to learn, too, when he was younger, but he had been bored and his parents had not insisted on his continuing. He regretted that now. It would have been nice to be able to make music.

He went downstairs and at last to the Food Hall. The smell of the rotted perishables was very faint, barely perceptible. He had kept on the whole to a fairly narrow range of diet, ringing the changes on things he liked, but today he felt adventurous and looked for more exotic items. Quails' eggs in aspic, pressed boar's head, haggis, venison steaks, occra, salsify, sauerkraut. . . . He picked up tins of
kangaroo meat and rattlesnake, but put those back on the shelf. Cherries in brandy, on the other hand, struck him as worth taking.

Tins of curry powder. . . . His grandfather had been fond of curries and that—curried lamb ­usually—had been their regular Tuesday supper. He hefted the tin, trying to remember the details of his grandmother's preparations. He had a hazy recollection of sliced onions simmering golden-yellow in butter, and the curry powder being added to brown with them. How much, though? A tea-spoonful? Or a table spoon? And hadn't there been flour, as well? He had no butter, but plenty of margarine in sealed packs. He decided to have a go, and added the tin of curry powder to the rest.

That was enough for today, he decided. He made his way back but by an unfamiliar route. He found himself traversing Cosmetics, his beam lighting up names which had presumably once been significant: Coty, Elizabeth Arden, Rochas, Dior, Rubinstein. And little counters, piled high with jars and bottles and cases of lipsticks. The display on one of the counters had collapsed, and the contents were spilled across the aisle. Neil was making a detour of the
mess when something on the fringe of the torch beam caught his eye. He stopped, and looked more closely. A bottle had broken, producing a pool of some white substance. But the whiteness was not complete. It was marred by something—the clear imprint of a shoe.

Neil told himself it meant nothing. It could have happened months ago. At the height of the Plague, perhaps—with some woman searching the empty store for something to cure the wrinkling of her skin, pulling down the display, maybe, in her despair and anger. But examining it more closely he noticed something else. This—he put out a tentative ­finger—was tacky. If the substance had been spilled long, it would have dried out. And the surface was snowy white; it had not yet collected the dust which lay thickly everywhere else.