Bar None (7 page)

I reach the end of the narrow lane and let the bike coast to a standstill. The Range Rovers stop behind me, and I hear doors opening, feet crunching on the road. Nobody speaks, because there is so much to say.

The lane emerges out onto the dual carriageway that follows the course of the river past the town. There are a few buildings on this side of the waterway—a petrol station, a fast food restaurant hunkered low in a lay-by, a terrace of old houses still looking angry at the road's intrusion on their long front gardens—but the real town starts directly across the carriageway and over the river. We're still slightly elevated here, because I stopped a hundred meters from the side of the main road. I sense a definite boundary: behind us is the Manor and the time we spent there; before us, once we are on the road, lies a future hinted at by a man who came and went in one day. We can see into the first streets of the city, and this is a very private moment for us all.

I have not been this close to a town for six months. I have watched from the relative safety of the folly, seen winter and spring settle across this dead place, but I have not really been close enough to
see
. One of the blocks of trendy riverside apartments across from us has been gutted by fire, its steel-framed roof warped and angry. The rendered façade is scorched black, windows smashed, and in the small garden leading down to the water lay several shapes that could be burnt furniture or dead people. The sun is at just the right angle to shine through the shattered windows, and even from this distance I can see the shapes of picture frames hanging askew on walls, and the shadow of a fallen ceiling. From the folly I had noted this place as a smear of black on the otherwise blinding white façade of the riverfront properties. Here, the detail is depressing.

A body is hanging from a third-storey balcony several properties along from the burnt building. It's neck has been stretched to an impossible length, and I'm amazed it's still hanging there at all. The glint of bone shows through tattered clothing. The head is a mass of dirty blonde hair, and I can just make out one silver shoe, sharp against the corpse's uncertain outline.

There are abandoned cars on the dual carriageway, most of them parked along the hard shoulder, windows gritty and dusted from the winter downpours. The rain still bears dust, and Cordell thinks that there may have been a war somewhere far away in those long, final days. Even as death stalked the drivers they obeyed old habits. The cars are mostly well parked, only a few edging noses or rears out into the inside lane. But there are also those that are not parked at all, and it's these that makes me think we will never get more than a few miles.

To the south, a crash has left a shiny black scar across both lanes of the southbound carriageway. The dark remains of several cars and a truck are twisted together, and the fire that consumed them six months before also melted and reset the road. I can see an easy way past along the hard shoulder, but there will be more accidents like this.

I keep glancing up at the sky. None of those flying things makes itself known, and for that I am glad. This close, we would be able to see exactly what they are.

"Nothing in the sky," Cordell says. The others are looking as well. Yes, we're all glad.

We stand there for some time, all of us looking at this place we have only seen from a distance since the plagues. The detail is shocking, humbling, and it hits me all over again that things will never be the same.
Things are going to change
, Michael said.

The smell here is not too bad. I feel the breeze kissing the nape of my neck, a sign that the prevailing wind is carrying the city away from us. But still a hint of its decay hangs in the air, old rot and new devastation. I try to imagine all those thousands of places abandoned or filled with dead, and the overall image is as it always has been: a place of disease, stink, decay, scavenging animals and perhaps scavenging survivors as well. A place where none of us has any desire at all to go. There are homes in there with the family sitting dead around a laden dining table, one last meal interrupted by death. There are gardens filled with the remains of last year's unpicked fruit and vegetables, greenhouses still sealed and rank with rotten tomatoes, cucumbers, marrows and seedlings. There are bodies in gutters with their faces ripped off by wild dogs. Cinemas and theatres are filled with corpses, melting down together as decay does its work, because in the last days they were using such large public places as temporary morgues. The parks are also filled with the dead, some buried, many laid in piles alongside holes that will never be filled. Excavators sit like silent monsters beside them, perhaps with their drivers still at the controls. Much of the dying happened slowly but right at the end, when panic gave way to utter chaos and a regression to a more animal state, the final annihilation was mercifully fast.

And yet we survived. It's something none of us has been able to explain. I have not thought about it for a while, because I still believe myself to be relatively sane. Perhaps not compared to the older gauge of sanity—I dream, I scream, and I place value on my life in relation to the ales I have drunk and the memories those tastes inspire—but it works for me. We all have our ways to get by.

"It's the future that's important," Jessica says. "Not what we see now, all this
old
stuff."

"I sat over there once," Jacqueline says quietly. She points over the road and across the river at the expensive waterside apartments. I'm not sure whether she's indicating the spread of fire-gutted buildings, but I don't think it matters. "Sat on a balcony while Roger made gin martini cocktails. We watched boys swimming in the river, and later some adults went down there and stripped to swim. I was amazed at how unabashed they were. Naked, in front of everyone else. Roger smiled at me and touched the back of my neck." She touches herself there hesitantly, as though afraid that her fingers will feel someone else.

"We don't need to go across there," Cordell says. "The bridge is clear apart from a bike, but we don't need to go across there. We go around. Everywhere like this, we go around, until we reach Cornwall."

I glance at the road bridge and make out the shape of an abandoned bicycle straddling the white line at its highest point. I wonder where its rider had gone all those months ago. We can't see the actual surface of the river from here.

"I agree," I say. "There's nothing for us there."

"That's history," the Irishman says. And I shiver, because for an instant I'm certain he is right. If we try to cross the bridge and enter the dead town, we will find ourselves somewhere else entirely. Because right now we're looking at the past, and soon, as spring progresses and summer looms, nature will begin to look forward. Lawns will go wild, plant pots will seed themselves farther away, gardens will become unkempt and start probing limbs and roots beneath patios, toward walls and through the gaps of open windows.

"I remember it differently," I say.

"Let's go." Jacqueline climbs into her Range Rover and starts the engine. The noise brings us all around, and as I mount the motorbike and kick it to life the town seems to fade from my vision, covered with a haze from the river perhaps, or drawing away.

I see several large birds perched atop the blackened roof members across the river, and from this far away I cannot recognise the species.
Too small
, I think, but perception is a dangerous thing.

To begin with, it seems that most people wanted to park their cars properly before they died. Perhaps that sudden final onset of the diseases gave them enough time for a few last moments of lucidity. Going to collapse . . . get off the road . . . last thing I need is a shunt now . . . paperwork, insurance claims, all that time that hassle that expense . . . pull over, pull off . . . everyone else doing it too . . . strange . . .

Cars sit staggered along the hard shoulder, many of them with noses buried in the rears of those in front of them. Trailers lie on their sides or crushed open from impacts, and suitcases, bags, loose clothing and other personal items are strewn across the road. Most of the clothing is a uniform grey, sun, rain, frost and snow having bleached the material and sucked the colour down into the ground.

Other cars have been driven or shoved over the edge of the road and down into the ditch, some of them tipping onto their sides or roofs. Here and there they lie two or even three deep, and there are frequent signs of fires having broken out and ignited the fuel tanks.

I see bodies. I try to look away but cannot. I am the classic road accident rubber-necker, telling myself that I really don't want to see the results of these crashes but looking nonetheless. I thought I'd had my fill of death and suffering in those terrible final weeks of the plagues, but it seems that there is always that deep-set curiosity that can never be assuaged. Many of the cars hold vague shapes behind their windows, but most of the glass is no longer clear. The outside is dusty, and the inside seems to be touched with something as well. I wonder whether the rot of bodies could spread to glass, planting decay in the form of moist moss, greasy fungus, or a film of slickness locked in by windows shut tight.

Nobody wanted to breathe the air outside. Though it was late summer when the end came, still no one knew for sure how the diseases were carried.

Other bodies lie in the road and on the verge, splayed alongside open car doors. I see the white of bone through tears in rotten clothing. The smaller the shapes, the more distressing they are.

Here and there a vehicle has struck the central reservation and ricocheted away, hitting other cars and causing a tangle of wreckage that still sits where it happened. None of them were travelling very fast—the road was packed with people escaping the cities—but damage was exacerbated when vehicles following on behind shoved the shunted cars to the side of the road. They left the occupants trapped inside as they passed by.

They would have
, I think.
Can't open those windows, not when there may be germs outside, or infected people inside, disease-carrying flies . . .

I can barely imagine how bad it must have been. I suppose my own journey had been performed in relative comfort, three days after the end came. Ashley had started to smell badly by then, and I couldn't find the strength of body or mind to bury her. That was way too final. Ashley, my love, could never be below the ground. So I had left, and gone cross-country, and at the end of that first day travelling I had seen Cordell standing at the gates of the Manor.

I ride the bike slowly along the road, and already I'm trying to calculate how long this trip will take. On a normal day it would be a three hour journey at least, not allowing for any toilet stops or coffee breaks, hold-ups on the Severn Bridge or traffic queues on the perpetually road-worked M5. Now, travelling at thirty instead of eighty miles per hour, it is a day's journey.

But I know that there would be much more than this to hold us up.

When I drink Marston's Old Empire ale—malty, sweet, a gentle bitter finish—I can remember the first time I recognised nature for what it really was. I remember because it was a weekend I spent in a cottage in the Welsh mountains with the two best friends of my teens, Clive and Rob, drinking Old Empire and accepting whatever strange effects so many bottles of that potent brew presented. None of us had ever bothered with drugs, and even at that young age we were true acolytes of brewed hops. Rob had gone through a lager-drinking stage when he was seventeen, suffering much haranguing from me and Clive. But two years later he recognised it for what it really was—the gassy emission from Satan's dick—and he was back with us on the beer.

Ahh, the Heavens we found in so many pint glasses, in so many pubs. By the time I was thirty it was almost a way of life, but even at nineteen beer had a huge effect on me. Perhaps there's something in it, a chemical we're not quite sure of that reacts with the human mind, building a precious bridge between amber fluid and the psychic solidity of our thoughts. What I've always loved about drinking beer is that there's no real snob value attached to it. Go to a local beer festival and you'll pay the same amount for a new local brew as for that year's Best Beer winning brew. A half-pint glass, a tug on the handle, and a taste explosion that moves you one step closer to God.

I like wine, but I despise the culture of snobbery and pomposity built around it. A decent five-pound bottle honestly tastes better to me than the three-hundred-pound bottles I've tried, and I have tried them. Talked into it by friends, offered a glass of something special by work colleagues and some of Ashley's family, and while they haw and har and delight in the sheer decadence of a glass of wine worth more than an OAP's weekly cheque, I reach for the Jacob's Creek and have a much finer time.

So that weekend in Wales, when nature hit me between the eyes for the first time, was informed by the strong taste of one of Marston's finest, allegedly brewed to be shipped to India, though it never made it there. Whether that was simply publicity or fact, I was glad. It was a superb ale, and for the rest of my life I associated its taste with my true coming-of-age.

On the second day in the cottage, I volunteered to walk to the local farm to buy some eggs. We'd brought sausages, bacon and mushrooms, but a fry-up is naked without fried eggs. I took a pocketful of change and a head full of morning-after with me. Not a hangover, as such, more a woolly feeling that made me more than aware that we'd had a good few bottles each the night before. We'd been talking about future plans, what we wanted to do with our lives, and for an hour or two we'd become frighteningly serious.

Today would be different. Breakfast, a hike, then hitting the village pub for lunch.

There was a stile in the corner of the huge garden that led into the neighbouring field. I climbed over and dropped into the corn, walking around the edge so as not to trample too many shoots. I entered another world. I hadn't realised how much the order of the cottage's garden had bothered me until I walked with the hedgerow to my left, thick with brambles, spotted with bloody poppies, holed here and there with rabbit warrens, rustling and whispering with secret nature that, I was sure, was far more vocal away from where I walked. I had the impression that I dragged a bubble of silence with me, a cautionary stillness that accompanied my every footfall, every breath. Perhaps if I sat and remained motionless for long enough the world would start up again around me, but that would make me feel deceitful. Nature fell quiet around me for a reason, and that reason was that I was a human being. I could hardly blame it.