Kristin

Kristin

Michael Ashley Torrington

Kristin

Copyright
ⓒ
Michael Ashley Torrington

The right of Michael Ashley
Torrington to be identified

as the author of this work
has been asserted in

accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988

Conditions
of Sale

This book is sold subject to
the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Joe

Prologue

The Earth shook as if hammered by a colossal
fist and the burning mushroom cloud expanded and soared upwards for thousands
of feet into the black sky, illuminating everything for miles around.

He threw himself down and
curled into a ball in a futile attempt to shield
 
himself from the wave of searing, radio-active heat. But
then he realized he had little to fear from the detonation. He extended an arm
and found the cataclysm was very small, and he extinguished it with his thumb
and forefinger, like pinching out a candle flame at night.

He awoke with a violent
jerk. There were screams from outside. A discordant wailing.

Stumbling to the window he
leaned on the damp sill and spread the slats of the blind, peering out onto the
dark streets below. Lights were being switched on — first one, then
another. A door opened. A figure ran off into the night. There were more
harrowing screams. A beacon pulsed rhythmically, like a lighthouse, from
somewhere in the heart of the city.

Sick welled in Thom
Sharman’s gullet. He sank to the floor, the drone of the four minute warning
resounding in his ears, closed his eyes tight and waited for the imminent,
thunderous impact, for the end of life.

But four minutes passed ...
five ... six ... the end didn’t come. He picked up the remote, jabbed it. The
television sprang to life, lighting up the room, and an urgent voice boomed
out, ‘ ... are in error, I repeat ... ’

He opened his eyes.

‘ ... The current warnings
in London and Birmingham are erroneous ... there is no cause for alarm ... ’

He shook with laughter.

‘ ... Please listen for
further announcements ... ’

The presenter repeated the
message again ... and again ... and again.

He stared blankly for a few
moments then lunged for a book and launched it at the plasma screen, shattering
the fragile glass membrane into a thousand pieces.

The ear-splitting din
outside stopped.

Dragging himself up he
returned to the window, slid it wide open and
 
screamed until his throat was raw. The biting cold froze him
to the bone but
 
he revelled in the
glorious night air, drinking its purity. Then he fell to the floor amidst the
fragmented glass and grabbed the whisky bottle from the table.

One

A bitterly cold wind howled around his front
porch and Thom left its haven with reluctance, a heavy frost that had
accumulated overnight cracking under the weight of his feet. As the first snowflakes
of the winter settled on the shoulders of his thick coat he took the usual
network of Greenwich’s back streets leading to the River Thames. The cold
sliced right through him. But it wasn’t just the weather that stripped him
bare. The world around him felt immutably altered.

By the time he reached the
river the light flakes of snow had transformed into a blizzard. Thom grimaced,
yanked up his collar and leaned into the freezing onslaught, heading towards
the rotunda, the entrance to the foot tunnel beneath the Thames. He stepped
into the cavernous Edwardian elevator
  
with a handful of numbed fellow commuters, forcing a
place on the polished bench. The lift operator waited for a moment and pressed
the button to close the doors.

Through the sparse forest
of marching legs and swinging cases he glimpsed a figure huddled against the
cold, white-tiled, tunnel wall. Somebody dropped some change into the paper
coffee cup at the girl’s feet and she tried to acknowledge the donation. She
wore only a T-shirt, denim jacket, jeans and
  
sandals, from which her bare toes protruded, curled
against the sub-zero temperature.

Thom had always been
indifferent towards the plight of London’s itinerant
   
population. They were dropouts. Wasters. Giving
them money only made things worse, drew more of their kind onto the city’s streets.
He wouldn’t give her anything, not even a sympathetic glance. He’d do nothing
to encourage her.

But as he passed the girl
he made the error of looking down and her eyes,
 
overwhelming black hemispheres devoid of white, met his. He
recoiled, stumbled and walked on quickly.
Why did she have to make eye contact? Damn
her! Now he was involved, responsible for the useless bitch’s welfare, guilty
if he didn’t return. Cursing, he rummaged in his trouser pocket and
backtracked.

His shadow stirred her from
her stupor. She lifted her head and shivered, her pitch eyes staring
unblinkingly as they tried to focus on the opposite wall. She accepted his
offering in silence. He nodded and headed towards the north exit.

The next morning, Wednesday morning, was
even colder and the easterly wind cut through the tightly woven fabric of his
winter coat with ease. He hadn’t followed his usual routine that morning,
hadn’t caught the news update on television, hadn’t showered or eaten. All that
mattered to him was returning to the tunnel, finding the girl again. It had
been the coldest night he could remember and he’d slept fitfully, her
beautiful, but destitute image slipping in and out of his mind. Where did she
go when darkness fell? She couldn’t stay in the tunnel, the guards always
cleared out any stragglers and locked the gates.
How
had she made it through that night
?

Thom wondered if it was
possible for somebody to lose weight in twenty-four hours? She appeared
emaciated. Her skimpy clothing was encrusted with dried vomit and the bags
under her eyes made her look like she hadn’t slept in a week.

She stared at him, and then
her head dropped back to its original position against her knees and she began
to rock back and forth like a child.

‘...You don’t remember me?’
he asked.

She looked up again. ‘Yes,
I re-member, you were here a few days ago.’

‘I was here yesterday.’

‘Yester-day. One day is the
same as the next down here.’ She let her head fall back against the tiles with
a crack.

He tried to place her
accent —
Russian
?
There was a middle-aged man from Volgograd at work who sounded similar ... no,
her vowels didn’t sound the same. Romanian?
Czech
? ‘You must be cold?’ he asked.

‘Cold … yes.’

He found a five pound note
and pressed it into her palm. ‘Spend it on something sensible — a hot
drink, some food?’

‘A hot drink. Some food.
Yes.’ The plume of her breath obscured her face.

‘Do you have a name?’

‘A name. Yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘ ... Kristin.’

‘I’m Thom,’ he smiled,
infatuated, and left her.

Two

Thomas Sharman bought and sold stocks and shares
for a living, amidst the noise and bustle of scores of others who did the same
thing. It called for absolute concentration. An error on his part could end up
costing his employers hundreds of thousands of pounds and he could not
concentrate. All he could think about was Kristin, of her absence from the
Greenwich Foot Tunnel for the last two days.

By late afternoon obsession
had consumed him. He left the trading floor in mid-transaction and walked from
the gleaming steel and glass building without his coat.

The underpass was deserted, but alive with a
wholly unnatural force beyond his comprehension. He walked to its midway point,
where it dipped to its lowest level and from where neither end was visible,
then paused and continued, ascending the incline towards the south exit. Her
dark, hunched form was still missing from the colourless hue of the tunnel
ahead. A wave of unbearable sorrow overcame him and he fell against the icy
wall. Then, when his grief had subsided he returned home, fell into the sofa
and drank the whisky bottle dry.

Soon he was in the same place, sitting on a
hill overlooking a city. The bomb
 
detonated in the air to the east. Now he could identify the metropolis:
It was London.

Confident of his powers he
reached out to stifle the explosion as he’d
 
done before but retracted his burned fingers quickly. He
watched, aghast, as the nuclear flower spread with ferocious power and speed,
engulfing and incinerating all in its path: the Square Mile, the West End. The
great parks were instantly carbonized. The bridges: Tower, London, Southwark,
exploded and the river combusted, dividing the north of the capital from the
south with a wall of flames that licked hundreds of feet into a crimson sky. A
woman with eyes of frozen onyx sprawled upon the grass. His mother appeared,
holding
 
out her arms in
desperation, but he couldn’t reach her and he screamed as the burning shock
wave hit her, tearing the clothes and the flesh from her before atomizing her
bones.

Then it was time for him to
die. But as he slipped into the finality of death a voice called out to him,
begged him to stay and he listened, he returned.

Thom checked his watch — nine in the
morning. He’d been lying there for over sixteen hours. He rolled off the sofa,
grabbed a coat and left.

When the elevator doors
opened the black silhouette signifying her return jolted him, and his eyes
watered.

She was asleep beneath a
filthy grey blanket, balled-up carrier bags stuffed beneath her head. Her black
locks lay in lifeless, matted clumps and she smelled of urine. She flinched as
he pulled back the covering, exposing her pallid face to the harsh, fluorescent
light.

‘ ... Thom,’ she moaned
through purple lips, propping her herself against the wall.

‘You don’t look well.’

‘I am … sick,’she groaned,
spitting pure black phlegm onto the ground.

‘ ... Did you get yourself
something to eat?’

She stared at him,
vacuously.

‘ ... With the money I gave
you.’

‘Some body stole the money.
Whilst I slept. I sleep a lot down here, not much else to do.’

‘When
did
you last eat ?’

‘I can not say. Days. I am
used to it. But I found some thing that looked ed-ible, on the ground.’

He held out a hand and
pulled her up, supporting her until they reached the elevator, and took her to
Carlo’s, a small bistro near the pier. Inside, he
 
handed her a red holdall, ‘Clothes,’ he explained.

‘Clothes.’

‘They were Shannon’s.’

‘Shannons.’

A friend ... girl friend
...
old girl
friend
. They’ve been in the wardrobe for months. Probably not the right
size. She was a six, you look more like a four, and I’m not sure about the
pumps but at least they’ll be warmer than yours.’

She snatched the bag
ungratefuly and began to remove her reeking attire.

‘ ...
No ... in there
,
change in there
,’ he pointed. ‘Stuff
your gear in the bag and I’ll put it in the wash.’

‘Burn them. They dis-gust
me,’ she spat.

Thom sat and waited, looked around the café.
He’d frequented the place for
 
years but couldn’t remember the atmosphere so muted, so sombre. An
old
 
woman sat near the door,
sobbing, whilst the three other patrons listened as the tinny radio on a shelf
behind the counter blared the latest news.

There was no doubt in his
mind that the seeds of the situation had been sown twenty years earlier with
the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Weaponry that should have been located
and decommissioned — short and long-range ballistic missiles, centrifuges,
and indeterminate quantities of enriched uranium had been recklessly auctioned
to the highest bidders. Scientists had even been included in the price of the
sale to ensure everything went smoothly for the customers.

Inevitably, the weaponry
had ended up with rogue states, dictatorships and international terrorists
— people who had an axe to grind with the nations of the Western World
and in whose hands it could least be trusted, including a group of Islamic
fundamentalists holed up in Afghanistan — psychopathic zealots
responsible for a spate of worldwide bombing that had claimed over a thousand
lives.

Kristin looked very different when she
reappeared. She’d washed her hair, and the clothes — stonewashed jeans,
black roll-top jumper and cream-coloured, fur-trimmed suede coat were only just
too big for her. The shoes seemed to fit her exactly.

She went straight to the glass-fronted
food cabinet, surveyed its contents and looked at him in confusion. ‘What food
should I eat?’

‘Whatever you want,’ he
shrugged, joining her.

There is so much. I do not
know what should be eaten and what should not be eaten.’

‘The chicken is ... ’

‘Chick-en.’

She’d used no intonation
and had broken another common word, apparently unfamiliar to her, in two.

‘Is the chick-en ... hot?’
she asked, posing her first question.

‘Yes.’

‘Will it harm her ... me
... create more sick-ness?’

‘ ...
No
... you’re just hungry.’ He looked at
her with curiosity and made the decision for her. ‘Carlo, chicken with
tagliatelle twice ... and two coffees — OK for you?’

‘Coff-ees ... yes.’

Carlo didn’t even
acknowledge him. Everything had changed.

Thom put Kristin in her mid-twenties. She
was of average height and waif-like physique — almost certainly
exacerbated by her impoverished lifestyle. Her hair, long and straight, was as
close to black as possible and her skin, despite the ravages of her day to day
existence was white, flawless. Her facial features were highbred, classical,
perfect enough to have been sculpted from
 
the finest alabaster. But her eyes were extraordinary —
mesmerizing, infinite spheres of sparkling black. They were unique, beautiful.
Penetrating, chilling. She was a beguiling woman. And he had become beguiled,
for the first time in his life.

He watched her eat. Perhaps
it was simply hunger, but she didn’t seem to chew what she’d forked, clumsily
into her mouth, and she choked repeatedly. Her reaction to each mouthful swung
between ecstasy and revulsion, as if each represented an entirely novel experience.

She sipped the coffee once
then opened her gullet and poured the whole contents of the cup down, gargling
the hot liquid as it scalded the soft tissue of her throat before spitting it
out across the table ‘Pain!’ she rasped, slamming the cup down, cracking it.

He stared at her in
astonishment;
was
it possible she
’
d never had a hot drink before
?

‘ ... I missed you ...
during the week,’ he said.

‘I was there, same place.
Never changes.’

‘But I passed right
through, couldn’t see you.’

His persistence irritated
her.

‘Tell me about yourself,
I’m curious? Where are you from, how did you end up sleeping rough?’

‘Not much to know. I was
born, some-where. In the Czech Re-public ...
do you have a cigar-ette
,
Thom
?’

‘Sure.’ Czech, he was
right! He removed the cellophane from a new pack of Dunhills.

She put the cigarette
between her chapped lips and he lit it with an enamelled gold lighter he’d
received as a gift. She inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out through her nostrils
and gagged. ‘ ... Fuck! Dizzy and sick and burned!’

‘Been a while?’ he asked,
as she held her head. But, clearly, she had never smoked before.

‘I came here ... eight
months ago ... ’ she coughed,‘With a … friend. We lost contact and I could find
no work. I … begged … at Baker Street underground, then I moved to Moorgate,
and then some body told me about Greenwich. There are not as many people here
but they seem more ... generous.’

‘Can’t you get any help?’

‘
Help
,
who would help me
?’ she frowned, drawing
on the cigarette and blowing the smoke into his face.

‘ I mean, benefit … ?’

‘What is that?’ she
snapped.

‘Money, from the state?’

‘
Money
? No.’

‘Feeling any better?’

‘Yes … feeling better.’

Thom was staggered by the
lack of worldliness of the young woman facing him across the small, scruffy
table. He’d never encountered such naivety in somebody of her age, had expected
her to be more wily, streetwise. Instead, she displayed the behavioural traits
of a girl of thirteen and was very highly strung. But her command of the
language, although clipped, staccato, was undeniable and her fluency improved
with every sentence she formed, as though she were a novice learning at an inconceivably
fast speed.

He looked outside —
it had grown dark. He checked his watch, ‘I’m sorry, I need to go.’

‘You must leave?’

I promised my mother I’d
call by.’

‘
Mother
? I do not remember a mother. But
my father was very bad.’

He looked at her inquisitively
as they walked.

‘There were two of us. I
mean, I had a brother, but my father hated me and sent me from his house
forever, whilst my brother was allowed to stay.’

‘You don’t see them?’

‘Only when I dream. I
despise them both and when I see my brother again I will kill him.’ She moaned
and brought a hand to her temple. ‘Pain!’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I get pain, in my head,
when I feel anger.’

‘You should see a doctor.’

‘
Doc-tor
? Yes.’

They reached the rotunda
and stood in silence.

‘Will you be OK?’ he asked,
eventually.

‘OK?’

‘All
right, will you be ... ?’

‘Yes. I will be ... all
right.’

‘Good luck anyway, maybe
we’ll meet again?’

‘Oh, we will,’ she said
with absolute assurance, and vanished into the underworld without looking back.