Seoul Survivors (5 page)

All Damien wanted was a stiff G&T, but Jake had warned him on no account was he to get pissed. He had to breathe deeply instead:
breathe deep
. That counselor, years ago, had once said:
Jessica's still connected to you, she's part of you: like oxygen, like all the atoms that make up the universe
. He'd done visualization exercises in their weekly sessions, which, amazingly, had eventually worked. He'd started to be able to nip his flashbacks in the bud, and one day he realized they just weren't tripping him up anymore. Now, when he thought about his sister he imagined her just floating out there, like some black hole he'd one day get sucked into but didn't need to worry about now. He hadn't felt this burning, bottomless fear for a long time, not even when Dad died.

Gradually the lungfuls of stale cabin air diluted his panic and the memory emerged: hide-and-seek in the cemetery after church, Jessica in a blue dress, hiding behind a tombstone, laughing, just a bit of her blue dress visible. He hadn't remembered any of that before. No, that wasn't exactly true: he remembered the graveyard clearly, and he knew they used to play in it, but only because Dad had talked about it once. But he'd forgotten so much of what happened before Jessica disappeared.

Dad. Jessica
. Was he thinking about them because of the argument he'd had with Mum before he left?

“You want me to pay your airfare to Korea?” she'd asked, incredulous. “Damien, you're thirty-five years old and you've done nothing but drift around your entire life. When are you going to grow up?”

He'd held the MoPho away from his ear and tried to keep his cool. “Mum, once I get there I'll be earning good money—I'll pay you back before Christmas. Plus, I won't be on housing benefit anymore, so you'll have one less thing to complain about, okay?”

“That's what you said when Gordon and I paid for that sound engineering course. A year later you were on the dole again.”

He couldn't stop himself then. “Christ, Mum, I graduated at the start of a fucking world-wide economic collapse—which, frankly, Gordon helped cause!”

“Oh, Damien.” Here it came again: the heavy sigh, the catch in the voice, the tears and then the simmering incrimination rising to a crescendo to finish him off: “Why is it always like this? What happened to you? Where did my lovely, talented, bright little boy go? I can't just keep giving you money, Damien—I'm not helping you, really I'm not. You need to stand on your own two feet, make something of yourself, to honor Jessica if nothing else. What would she think of you now? Wasting all your precious gifts.”

She'd never gone that far before. “Shut the fuck up about Jessica,” he'd demanded, and hung up without saying goodbye.

Damien opened his eyes. There was a reason he spoke to his mother twice a year and thought about his family as little as humanly possible. At least his temperature felt normal again now, and his stomach was back down at Quease Level 3. But Christ, no
Tomb Raider
, no
Spore
, no spirits, no lager; plus his dead sister haunting him, six double-bagged condoms of hash in his guts and a cement-filled case of self-inflicted constipation. This was going to be a fuck of a long flight.

“You like water?”

The stewardess had reappeared with a bottle of IceCap and a corn-plastic cup. He didn't like the fact he was drawing attention to himself, but water was a good idea. He nodded thanks and took the cup—desalinated Atlantic, not his favorite H
²
O, but they all had to do their bit to lower sea levels.

The stewardess poured the water. “Thanks,” he mumbled as she twisted the cap back on the bottle.

“Why you come Korea?” she asked.

Afraid he would blush again, he avoided meeting her gaze—but hey, maybe a little special attention from the female of the species was just what Dr. Jake would have ordered.

“I'm visiting a friend,” he told her. Good rehearsal for the passport officer.

“Friendship flower of life,” she informed him, gravely. “Is Korean saying.”

He risked a smile up at her. “I'll remember that.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Uh!” she gasped, “you look like
Hu-gee Grant
!”

Hu-gee Grant?
Who the f—? Oh, right:
Hu-gee
thanks. So all his organic eco-nonsense metrosexual skincare routines had done nothing then. From beneath his floppy fringe, Damien beseeched her, “You do mean his son, don't you?”

She giggled, just a normal laugh, nothing to freak out about. “Oh yes, you very young look.”

“Thank you.” Emboldened, he ventured, “So do you.”

“Oh no, I very old,” she said, a look of distress sweeping over her face.

He'd managed to upset her with a compliment? Christ, what was he supposed to say now?

To his relief, she recovered her composure. “You need anything, press button,” she told him.

Actually, there
was
something he wanted—something that would answer a few questions and take his mind off his fucked-up family. “Do you have a Korean newspaper? In English, I mean?”

She gasped again. “You want read Korean news?” So he'd made up for his disastrous attempt at flirtation, then. “I bring, right away.”

He watched her lovely bottom sway back down the aisle. She tripped back moments later with a copy of
The Korean Herald
. He unfolded it with pleasure—fuck iPads; reading foreign papers always made him feel like a le Carré spy, an “old hand.” And today he even had a proper covert agenda.

At Heathrow, the UK papers had all devoted their front pages to the news that the global rise on pre-industrial average temperatures had now reached one point two degrees Celsius.
The Times
had predicted that the World Cup would be swamped by a British monsoon; the
Independent
had warned of a world dominated by hurricanes, disease, crop failure and mass extinctions; the
Guardian
, to celebrate Summer Solstice, had sent a lifestyle journalist to interview a Druid. Damien had avidly scanned this article and bingo, there it was: “What about Lucifer's Hammer?” the journo had inquired. “Is a two-mile-wide meteor really hurtling toward Earth as we speak? And if so, will it land at Stonehenge?”

To give the beardo his due, the Druid hadn't risen to the bait. “Let us hope not,” he'd replied. “Our ancestors built Stonehenge after the period of global darkness that followed the Australian Ocean meteors of six thousand years ago. They needed to know that if such a catastrophe were ever to re-occur, they would be able to gauge from the stars the right time to plant their spring seeds. If for whatever reason—meteors, mega-volcanoes, nuclear catastrophe—human civilization has to start again from scratch, we're going to need those stones.”

This bloke obviously had his solar-paneled yurt all kitted out in Wales. Damien had put the paper back in the stand, wishing
the Druid luck when half the population of Liverpool and Greater Manchester arrived, ripping up the crops with their stilettos and crashing their Chelsea tractors into the wind turbines. Or whatever they called Chelsea tractors in the North—Chester tractors, probably. Though they'd be more like armored tanks when survivalist Britain's long-simmering tribal warfare finally kicked off. Which, even if the Hammer hit the Moon instead of Earth, was going to be soon. Globally, a new drought, flood or economic crisis was reported practically every week.

What freaked Damien out though, was that hardly anyone in the UK seemed to be taking the situation seriously. The broadsheets loved an alarmist headline, but after reading the average Sunday paper one would be forgiven for thinking global warming was a cunning plot to force people to buy Fairtrade chocolate. Even the
Indy
believed that at worst the great British public might have to accept fewer baths and obligatory candlelit dinners. And all of them scoffed at the Hammer theorists.
Is this complacency confined to Europe?
he'd wondered as he'd waited to board the plane; how was South Korea preparing for the coming eco-apocalypse?

In a leisurely manner, it appeared. The front page of
The Korean Herald
boasted a photo of Seoul office workers sunning themselves during their lunch-break, secure in the knowledge that their country was building eight new nuclear reactors, despite national riots against them. Snorting to himself, Damien scanned the article: a government minister deplored Korea's alarming expenditure on carbon credits from Sierra Leone; an environmental campaigner warned of torrential rains, coastal flooding, another Fukushima, vats of radioactive waste already sitting for years above ground because no one wanted them buried in their own backyard. In other words, Korea was a complete policy mess, just like everywhere else.

Damien stretched his legs beneath the seat in front of him. Plan Can was definitely the only game in town. When the Hammer hit and seven billion people all stampeded for safety at once, the chance of finding somewhere reasonably stable to live would be zero; cool dudes needed to take action well in advance. He still had to convince Jake to help him, but the fact that Korea, climate change-wise, was a big fat sweating duck would only make his case more persuasive.

Do they eat duck in Korea
, he wondered? And what else did Koreans worry about apart from the cost of banging up thousands of environmental protestors? He flipped through the rest of the paper. In contrast to the UK news, there was very little coverage of the NATO
bombardment of Pakistan; instead there were long articles on the new famine in North Korea, the Russian invasion of Estonia and the Chinese take-over of Taiwan. The famine, the worst since the nineties, had been intensified by the new leader's rejection of international relief, while the Americans were using the two putsches as excuses to build new military bases in Poland and Pusan, on the south coast of the Korean peninsula—Pusan? That rang a bell. Didn't Jake go there once for a film festival and end up sleeping with a Russian hooker by mistake?

Damien stuffed the paper into the seat pocket. The smell of microwaved tomatoes was invading the plane. The last thing he wanted to do was eat, but Jake had said it would be suspicious not to. He'd better get rid of the pill packet now, before he forgot.

He managed to get to the loo without fainting this time. On his way back to his seat another pretty stewardess batted her eyelashes at him. Was she also confusing him with a washed-up film star? To take his mind off this deeply worrying possibility he tracked through the music channels—rubbish as usual—then waited for his dinner, rice with hake in tomato stew. After the meal, he wrapped himself in his blanket and began to compose a soundtrack in his head: a peaceful skull-space of ambient industrial disintegration, a clicking abacus and the chiming of grandfather clocks. Throw in some Meshmass and the latest Noise Merchant mix and it was almost a lullaby . . . apart from the anvil and Hammer . . .

Light was pouring into the cabin. People were stirring, chatting in their long, drawn-out, sawing language. Damien groaned. His mouth was as dry as a stale Hobnob and his stomach felt like he'd swallowed a bag of cricket balls. Where was that bottle of water?

At least no one was looking at him anymore. Like happy robots, everyone was going through the routine of preparing to land: filling out boarding cards, queuing for the loo, lowering their seat-back trays, eating cardboard bread rolls and yogurt.

Landing—oh fuck, here it came:
sheer terror.

He shut his eyes and returned to counting his breaths, which had no effect on his thumping pulse, but at least stopped him from attacking the emergency exit and throwing himself out of the plane. Though he willed the pilot to circle the airport forever, landing was accomplished with the usual wobbly roar. Blood slithering around like mercury in his veins, he lingered as the other passengers jostled for space in the aisle. Thinking it wouldn't be smart to be last—and aware of Laptop Guy waiting behind him—he finally managed to
push into the wake of a Korean woman dressed in long gray linen robes. This was it, possibly his last walk as a free man. And it was a knock-kneed shuffle, hemmed in by a Buddhist nun and a
Starboarder
zombie.

The stewardess greeted him at the doorway. “Goodbye! Thank you!” she said brightly. Then she tugged at her colleague's sleeve, and suddenly two beautiful women were covering their mouths with their hands and tittering at him. “You be very famous in Korea, we think,” his new friend finally plucked up her courage to declare.

He gave the women a sick rictus grin. Yup, the mug shots would be in the paper tomorrow. As he disembarked into the landing tunnel, a combination of the heat and pure panic set off every last sweat gland. Christ, his face was sopping wet. Didn't he have a Kleenex? He stuck his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a hanky.

A hanky? Oh, right, from Mum's wedding—is that how long it had been since he wore this suit? She had beetled over with it at the reception, he remembered, freaking out in case he blew his nose on a grotty tissue in front of Gordon's
Tatler
-editor sister. He shoved the cloth back in his pocket and wiped his face with his hand. If Mum had lent him that money instead of having a go at him about Jessica he wouldn't now be teetering on the verge of this deep shit-filled abyss.

Stomach in spasms, legs on autopilot, he let the herd nudge him into the passport control hall. The queue of foreigners was short. Whatever happened, it would be over very soon.

Buddhist Lady was ahead of him, an American passport in her hand. His heart hurling itself at his chest now, he inched forward, compulsively flicking the edge of his landing card with his thumbnail. For Occupation, he'd wanted to put Deconstruction Worker, but had settled on IT Consultant. An IT Consultant with no laptop: what the fuck had he been thinking? Well, it was too late now. Anyway, the big test was going to be his passport. It expired in exactly six months, the precise length of the visa, not to mention the day all the most reliable websites were predicting Lucifer's Hammer would hit.