Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (31 page)

‘Oh.’ She seemed disappointed.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I wanted to see a bit of London. The last time I was here I was hardly more than a kid.’

‘There’s nothing much to see,’ he said flatly. ‘Nothing but death and destruction, dogs, rats and a million broken windows.’

‘If we looked around a bit, you might find something you needed,’ said Liz hopefully.

Greville smiled. She was as eager and as pathetic as a child trying to talk an adult into giving it an outing.

‘All right,’ he capitulated. ‘You can have a couple of hours. Then it’s back to Norfolk. I can’t risk any night driving.’

‘Greville, you’re my kind of transie,’ she said gleefully. ‘And any time you feel like a good screw—’ she pulled a face ‘—I mean, any time you wish to engage in carnal distraction, just make a noise.’

He laughed. ‘Where do you want to go to first?’

‘The Festival Hall. About ten centuries ago, I was taken to a concert there – a piano recital by a Hungarian called Georgia Sniffles, or something like that. He was marvellous. I always remembered it.’

‘Waterloo Bridge doesn’t look too healthy,’ Greville pointed out.

‘Aren’t there any other bridges?’

He started the car, turned it round and went back to Westminster Bridge. Presently, after having made various detours round blocked streets, he pulled up outside the Festival Hall. Liz jumped out happily.

‘Careful,’ he warned. ‘There may be a brigade of livestock lurking inside.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Liz. ‘There’s nothing to eat here, except maybe a few hundredweight of sheet music.’

Nevertheless, Greville loaded his shotgun and then rummaged in the back of the station wagon until he found a single-barrel four-ten, which he gave to Liz with a handful of cartridges. He also gave her a battery powered torch.

‘It’s going to be dark inside,’ he said. ‘But don’t use the torch more than you need. Dry cells that still work are hard to come by these days.’

The Festival Hall seemed like a great derelict barn. Broken glass lay around in profusion. As they passed through the main doorway, they left the bright morning sunlight behind and entered a deep necropolitan gloom. The thin pencil beam of the torch probed a scene of desolation. Much of the wood panelling had been ripped away – presumably for fuel – and even the banisters of the main staircase had been hacked to pieces.

Liz, determined not to be oppressed by the destruction, began to hum tunelessly to herself. She led the way up the stairs, hesitating only momentarily when she had to step over a clean-picked skeleton still wearing the tattered remains of a printed dress like a grotesquely gay shroud.

‘Rats,’ said Greville, as the torch beam hovered briefly over the sad heap of bones.

‘Where?’ whispered Liz apprehensively.

‘I don’t mean here and now. But
that’s
the work of rats. Dogs would have crunched the bones. So would the kind of cats that have managed to survive … Let’s get out. This place is too depressing.’

‘I want to see the hall,’ protested Liz. ‘I want to see where Georgie Sniffles had his grand piano, and I want to imagine all the people – the fat old ladies, the men in dinner jackets, the boys in brown corduroy, and all those girls in silk and taffeta rustling like a million grasshoppers.’

‘If you hear any rustling,’ retorted Greville, ‘shoot first and have visions afterwards. Rats don’t make allowances for nostalgia.’

Eventually they groped their way into the auditorium, a vault so black and so still that it seemed as if no sound at all – and certainly not music – could have disturbed its slumber for a thousand years. Strangely, there was not much damage. Here and there seats had been slashed, or clawed; and there was an overwhelming mustiness. But apart from cobwebs and mildew, the hall was structurally intact.

Liz shone the torch on the stage – and gave a small cry of wonder; for the last performance ever given in the Festival Hall had been The Nutcracker ballet. And the backcloth, frayed and tattered, was still miraculously hanging. Great faded Russian fir trees still loomed magically in the crystal forests dreamed of by Tchaikovsky. A few scatterings of paper snow – or rat leavings – lay carelessly on the bare boards; and it seemed for a moment as if the lights might go up, the music begin, and the bright figure of the Snow Queen float gracefully from behind black velvet drapes.

‘Oh! Isn’t that absolutely wonderful!’ breathed Liz. ‘You can almost feel it – after all these terrible years.’

Suddenly, she dropped the torch and began to sob.

‘Come on,’ said Greville in a voice that was purposefully harsh. ‘You’ve seen enough. We’re getting out of here.’

He picked up the torch and guided the still sobbing Liz away from the fir trees and the pathetic and enduring snow. As they went down the stairs he wondered if, before the rats came, the skeleton lying bleakly under its covering of printed cotton had also seen Tchaikovsky’s fir trees and the paper snow of history. Perhaps the sad little skeleton had even danced upon that very stage. Perhaps it had once been a prima ballerina. Perhaps … He cut off the thoughts before they could develop further. He did not want to know about
the past any more. All he wanted – and all Liz wanted – was the blessed sunlight.

As they returned to it, the summer morning seemed incredibly sweet. They could not have been inside the Festival Hall more than about ten minutes. But to Greville it had seemed more like ten years. Slowly, Liz was recovering herself.

‘Maybe it would be better if we cut out the sight-seeing and headed for Norfolk,’ said Greville gently. ‘There’s not very much left in London now – apart from ghosts and scavengers.’

However, despite her recent tears, Liz was not to be deterred. ‘I may never come here again,’ she said. ‘I may get myself killed or swallowed up in the north … London was such a lovely exciting city, wasn’t it? I want to store up a few memories to tell all the grandchildren I’ll most likely never have … Besides, you promised. You promised me a couple of hours. You wouldn’t go back on your promise, would you?’

Greville sighed. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t be a transie if you didn’t like banging your head on a wall. Where to next?’

‘The centre of the universe,’ said Liz, suddenly gay. ‘Piccadilly Circus. We’ll sit in the Lyon’s Corner House, and drink coffee and watch all the people going to work.’

Greville drove the car back over Westminster Bridge, along the Embankment and up Northumberland Avenue. When they reached Trafalgar Square, it seemed momentarily like the day after a stupendous carnival or an orgy on the grand scale. There were two or three buses – one of them overturned – a cluster of taxis straddling the entry to the Strand, and an assortment of private cars large and small. Also there were people, lying about with careless abandon as if they were too drunk to move, as if they might have been celebrating some momentous occasion – such as the end of a war to end all wars.

The only trouble was, nothing moved. Nothing except the pigeons. For the pigeons were still there. With the conditioning of decades behind them, they would probably continue to haunt Trafalgar Square long after the last Londoner was dead.

Even as Liz and Greville glanced at the scene, the aftermath of the carnival resolved itself into a sunlit nightmare. The buses were rusty hulks, the taxis had been cannibalised for spare parts – even wheels and radiators – and some of the cars had been riddled with small-arms fire. The drunks – men, women and a few children – were no more than tattered rag-doll skeletons, lying where they had fallen, some of them with rusty guns cradled like strange talismans in arms that were only whitened bones.

And only the pigeons moved. They had been feeding (even pigeons had adapted to the new order – and a new diet) or basking or squabbling or merely strutting importantly among the buses. But the sound of the car had
disturbed them; and they rose angrily and noisily up into the morning sunlight, whirling past the high effigy of Nelson, who still stood on his column and stared serenely ahead with his wide blind eyes.

A shot rang out. A chip of roadway sprang up in front of the station wagon.

‘I thought there might be one or two about!’ snapped Greville obscurely. He slammed the car into first gear and accelerated. Another bullet ricocheted plaintively where a moment ago the station wagon had been standing.

Greville drove skilfully round the overturned bus, zigzagged among the wrecked small cars and then found a clear run through Cockspur Street and the Haymarket.

Piccadilly Circus presented much the same kind of petrified desolation as Trafalgar Square, except that two massive army tanks blocked the entry to Regent Street, and Eros – the frail statue which had once seemed like an irresistible magnet for hundreds of thousands of Londoners – had been blown to glory.

Piccadilly Circus had obviously been the scene of a pitched battle. The carnage was heavier than in Trafalgar Square, and tattered remnants of uniforms still hung over the disorderly heaps of bones. The front of the London Pavilion had been shot to pieces and so had Swan and Edgars. The main entrance to the Piccadilly Tube Station was merely a pile of rubble; and large pieces of masonry lay scattered among the bones and wrecked cars that blocked the entrances to Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue.

‘Satisfied?’ demanded Greville harshly.

Liz nodded, her face white.

‘Right. Now we can get the hell out of here and go to a place where it’s still relatively pleasant to live.’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘There’s just one thing more I’d like to see … It – it means quite a lot. I want to go to the British Museum. It’s all tied up with being a little girl and feeling safe and secure in a fairly normal world … My father used to go there a lot. He took me once or twice when I was about nine … Do you think we could take a quick look?’

‘If we don’t get ambushed on the way,’ retorted Greville grimly. ‘But that’s the last stop. After that, we’re off to Norfolk.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Liz. ‘That’s the last stop.’

Greville took the car along Coventry Street. He drove slowly. There were what looked like several miniature shell-holes in the scarred roadway, and the passing of the station wagon raised clouds of fine dust from the rubble.

So far, they had not encountered any human being – unless one could include the brief sniping in Trafalgar Square – but it was still quite early in the morning; and the ‘normal’ transnormal would give the rats and cats and other nocturnal scroungers plenty of time to disperse before he ventured forth. However, as the car turned up Charing Cross Road, Liz and Greville saw their first transie of the day – an old man almost bent double under the weight of an obviously heavy sack over his shoulder.

He took one glance at the car, dropped the sack and scuttled like a frightened rabbit. Out of curiosity, Greville pulled up by the sack and inspected its contents.

‘What is it?’ asked Liz.

‘Tinned goods.’ Greville looked along the road, but the old man was nowhere to be seen. He might still be lurking in a doorway or he might have decided to abandon his spoils rather than risk being shot. There was no way of knowing.

Greville opened the rear door of the station wagon and lifted the sack. ‘It would be a pity to leave this lot, wouldn’t it?’

‘What if he comes back?’ asked Liz.

‘What if he doesn’t?’

Finally they compromised by taking half the tins – mostly fruit juices, but there was also a tin of sausages and beans – and leaving the rest in the sack on the roadway.

‘I’m surprised the rats haven’t chewed the labels off,’ said Greville. ‘The old boy must have found them in a rat-proof cellar, somewhere.’

‘Or maybe,’ said Liz, ‘they were just tucked away in an old fridge.’

Having stowed away the dozen or so tins they had acquired, they set off once more towards the British Museum. Unlike Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, St. Giles’s Circus was hardly damaged, and they crossed Oxford Street without any difficulty. Even in Great Russell Street, there was nothing to impede their progress but a very few old skeletons without even a rag of clothing in the vicinity. In life, thought Greville as he drove past the pathetic remains, they might well have been a bunch of crackpot nudists. Anything was possible in a transnormal world. But what was more probable was that the corpses had been stripped to provide clothing for the living.

Outside, the British Museum seemed completely unchanged – as if it still proposed to endure for ever. But inside, the massive building was a ruin.

In the library, the works of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Jung and Einstein – along with obscure medieval chronicles, twentieth-century text-books of nuclear physics, histories of witchcraft and political philosophies – all had been converted into a vast cosmopolis of nests for vermin. Fortunately, the nests were old, the vermin had departed to make new conquests. But their half-digested droppings of Dante and Ouida, Homer and Silas K. Hocking remained.

The British Museum stank. And the stench was of decay and death, and blind and bloody futility. But, also, there were piles of charred books and smoke blackened ceilings. Testimony, perhaps, to the empty revenge of a few transnormals on the culture that had formerly rejected them. Or perhaps merely the work of homeless and starving children who had made fires to ward off evil spirits, emboldened animals and the bitter cold of darkness – until the rats took over.

But the devastation was not confined to the library. In the Egyptian Room the massive stone statue of Rameses still stood, defying rats, beetles, transnormals and time itself. But elsewhere the destructibles had been destroyed, the combustibles had been burnt, the eatables had been eaten.

As Greville surveyed the gloomy immensity of halls and galleries, he was surprised at how much of history could be eaten – and probably not only by insects and animals. But then, he reflected grimly, life was essentially cannibalistic. Cultures and societies consumed each other, as well as animals and men …

Liz had been silent. Unnaturally silent. She merely held his hand tightly like a small child. A frightened child. No father now to reassure her, no discreet whispers of ordinary people patronising the relics of the centuries with tepid and sophisticated curiosity. Only gothic halls of desolation and the almost tangible silence of the dead that have been made to die yet again.