The Crack (3 page)

‘We're in the middle of a disaster, man,' Harcourt snapped. ‘Good for the creative process anyway, to have a period without toys. I thought we'd been through that.'

A man with a bandaged head stirred and groaned loudly at the disturbance. Thirsk went over and peered down at him.

‘Look at this,' he chortled. ‘The unsevered umbilical cord and its consequences, eh, Harcourt?'

By the side of the patient lay a white-gowned anaesthetist. His hand still firmly clasped the needle which protruded from the patient's arm. Harcourt's worried expression vanished for a moment.

‘The death of non-separation,' he agreed. ‘This will serve as a lesson to the children.'

The analysts, tiptoeing like two Father Christmases leaving the nursery, left the hospital and struck off in the direction of Westminster. Although some of the buildings seemed to have lost their roofs, the disaster had been less complete here and Piccadilly, if you didn't count the fallen trees in Green Park and the strange new elongated shape of the Ritz, was much as before.

Thirsk and Harcourt strode along at a good speed. ‘We're in luck,' Thirsk remarked, ‘if you look at the situation objectively. This is just the kind of traumatic shock this society needs to jolt it out of its complacency.'

‘Which stems from repressed violence,' Harcourt put in almost before he had finished. ‘From the rebirth we should really have something to build on.'

Piccadilly Circus, which had succumbed to the will of the planners before the catastrophe and was now in the first stages of reconstruction, loomed before them. All of the roads out of it were blocked by accumulated rubble and Thirsk and Harcourt stood for a while, perplexed at which turn to take. Behind them, from a first-floor window in the crushed Ritz, an American woman cried for help.

‘The death rattle of capitalism,' Thirsk commented as he pulled up his robes and clambered over the debris. ‘We'd better make for St James's, I suppose.'

‘If only it would get light,' Harcourt complained. ‘My God, Joe, what's that?'

On the far side of the ruined circus, a procession advanced. It was led by what appeared, in the dank brown light of early dawn, to be a phantom – tall, evanescent, weightless. Hair as soft and white as a sheep's fleece flowed out over its shoulders and cast a pale glow on the crowd behind.

‘Girls! Women!' Harcourt cried. ‘Where are they going? Who are they?'

The procession turned down St James's, moving at a stately speed.

‘We'll see,' Thirsk muttered grimly. ‘Maybe they know something we don't.'

‘Oh, they couldn't,' Harcourt panted as he scrambled after Thirsk and slid down a splintery plank on to the ground. ‘What about Westminster, Joe? The Prime Minister? I mean …'

‘We follow,' Thirsk barked. Keeping a discreet distance, the two men followed the ghostly parade. The brown of the sky deepened, and the few stars went out.

In the hospital, the children were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The five-year-olds, led by Neddy and Mary, a brother and sister who were regressing together (and who before their rescue by Thirsk had been respectively at Wormwood Scrubs and Holloway) were playing doctors in the emergency wards. Neddy, brandishing his scalpel, was striding impatiently from bed to bed as Mary prepared the patients for their operations. He had decided to amputate the leg of a man with a serious heart condition, who was attached to various complicated-looking machines – and it seemed that someone in the latency period would have to be called in from the casualty ward downstairs to help dismantle them. Meanwhile, to the consternation of the new mothers in the maternity section, Jo-Jo and his evil contemporary Mrs Withers had had themselves carried along and placed in the cribs alongside the beds. Jo-Jo, determined to breast-feed, had already half suffocated two women in his attempt to subjugate them to his needs. Mrs Withers cried with a bitterness that was implacable.

Neddy made his incision and then sawed through the leg carefully. In the casualty ward, Tony, a ten-year-old schizophrenic,
to whom Thirsk had related with particular success, suddenly found his regression reversing. With a whoop of joy, he felt the onset of adolescence, the bristling of hairs on his chin, the unhealthy desire to rape a patient on an upper floor. His mind a jumble of poetic images, he ran for the stairs.

As Neddy handed the leg gravely to his sister, the screams of the geriatrics as they fell under Tony's wild embraces rang through the hospital.

Meanwhile, Thirsk and Harcourt were losing heart as they followed the fluorescent banner of Medea Smith's hair in the direction of the river.

‘They're probably just a crowd of crazies,' Harcourt hissed. His legs were shorter than Thirsk's, and his robe the same length. ‘Why don't we cut across to Westminster, for Christ's sake?'

Thirsk simply shook his leonine head in reply. They had arrived at the Kings Road by now, and his white feet, accustomed only to the cork floors of the Regression Centre, had developed blisters. In spite of his hobbling gait, Harcourt reflected, he looked splendid, almost prophetic. Comparisons with Moses and Karl Marx flashed through the young lay analyst's mind.

Medea and her followers turned down Flood Street. Eyes down, as if staring at the ground would make it go past quicker, the two men went after her. Then Thirsk glanced up, and – a rare occasion for him – gave an involuntary gasp. Harcourt, stumbling over the hem of his robe, bumped into him. They both collapsed on to the pavement at the intersection of Flood Street and Cheyne Walk.

There was no embankment! The broken road, which looked as if a giant tractor, simply for amusement, had ploughed crooked furrows in it and then departed, fell steeply into the mud flats of the drained river-bed. Leaning over it, like slender trees in a high wind, were the houses of Cheyne Walk. Above them towered Rossetti Gardens Mansions, at an angle of forty-five degrees, brooding menacingly over Cheyne Walk like an elephant perched on a ball. Sounds of cracking and straining masonry filled the otherwise unnaturally silent dawn.

Thirsk wiped his spectacles impatiently on his robe. ‘I still
can't see the other side of the river,' he snorted. ‘What about you, Harcourt?'

Medea and her band made their way, without any change of pace, towards the shattered remains of Battersea Bridge. Thirsk and Harcourt, undecided, stood looking after them.

‘A split in the river,' Thirsk mused as they picked their way across the road and stared at the almost invisible bank opposite. ‘A great crack! D'you see it, Harcourt?'

Harcourt said that he did. Suddenly, after the exhaustion of the night, he longed to be back in the States. He felt afraid and lonely. He clasped at Thirsk's arm.

‘A schizophrenic society indeed,' Thirsk proclaimed.

Harcourt, bursting into tears, whined to be taken home.

Jeremy Waters, his second wife, his two stepchildren and three children, the New Zealand au-pair girl and the family pets Adolf the spaniel and Ben the budgie were tipped out of their Hampstead home as the great new hill of North London was formed. They rolled down through the Village and ended up in the foothills, one of which was crowned triumphally by Marble Arch.

Waters – a prominent ecologist and anti-pollutionist – opened his eyes and found himself in what seemed to be a giant rubbish heap. The tiny moment of pleasure that came to him when he recognized the new scrumple-up disposable I.C.I. beercan a few inches from his face was succeeded by terror when he realized that there were several thousand of them – and that they had been thrown up into a towering mountain over a hundred feet high. A thin trickle of lager ran like lava from the summit of the uncertain volcano.

A muffled scream showed the whereabouts of Waters's family. He picked himself up with care and edged round the face of the mountain. Beneath him, as his vision cleared, he was able to see in the brown light, so reminiscent of his worst smog nightmares, a flattish terrain stretching out down Park Lane. What looked like a wrecked funfair stood forlornly amongst the fallen trees in Hyde Park.

Waters's foot stumbled against something hard and metallic.

Although he was not a mystical man, his heart missed a beat. Flying saucer? Spaceship? He tried to remember what his children believed in. What if they had been right all along? He stood staring down at it.

A big red circle. An O. Dropped casually by the new invaders? He looked fearfully up at the sky.

Waters's second stepson leapt towards him over the broken sewage pipes and fragmented pavement.

Chantilly Lace
And a pretty face …
You KNOW what I like.

Waters's hand swung out and knocked the transistor into silence. ‘Rubbishy music to serenade the end of mankind,' he snapped bitterly. For a moment he saw the pop groups of the sixties, the art of Andy Warhol and the boutiques of Carnaby Street as directly responsible for the apocalypse – and anger flared up inside him. Then his shoulders sagged and he gave a sigh of resignation. He had known this was going to come. But not so soon.

‘I'll change to Radio 3 if you like,' Tommy the stepson offered. He was an obliging boy, and had had to put up with a lot since his mother's remarriage and the move to Hampstead.

‘This is no time for Bach or Mozart,' Waters said self-pityingly. ‘Where's your mother?'

When Greta, the second wife, and the other children had been located, Waters suggested in as brisk a tone as possible that they move on to flat ground.

‘Regent's Park is our best bet,' he said, as if he had just received a radio message from that quarter. ‘Come on, off we go.'

He walked forward purposefully, hoping that no one would notice the ominous red circle behind him. Whatever happened, they must get as far away from it as possible. If it was anything – if it was in fact the transmitting station of the new conquerors of the world –

'Hey, the budgie's dead,' moaned Waters's youngest daughter. ‘Poor Ben! Oh, poor Ben.'

‘Come
on
,' Waters cried in exasperation. ‘There may be more dead than the budgerigar, I fear.'

We may be the only survivors, he thought to himself with a pang of fear. And hadn't he longed for the simple life, the camp fire and the homegrown, unsprayed potatoes? How often had he sat in the conservatory in Hampstead dreaming of the day when he and Greta would have a little farm of their own
and be entirely self-supporting? After he had done his bit against pollution, of course. But now – if they were the only people left in the world –

‘We've got to bury him,' the girl cried. ‘Daddy – please!'

With a great effort of willpower, Waters turned back towards the scarlet O. It was in the centre of it, it went without saying, that she was digging a hole for the grave. Children always knew, he thought gloomily.

Then it occurred to him that if they were to be saved from extinction it would be through children.

A strange selection of phrases came into his head. Suffer little children to come unto me. (Waters had had a very religious upbringing.) The Age of Aquarius. Generation Gap.

That red circle meant something to his daughter.

Visual imagination. Non-verbal communication. Thirsk's theories of regression!

Heart pounding, he watched the little girl lower the corpse of the bird into its last resting-place.

The budgerigar looked exotic now, its plumage bright and mysterious. A sacrifice to the new gods?

He glanced up at the spires of twisted rubble. With a reverence he had never felt even as a child at midnight mass, he gazed at the cathedral of the future. Pillars of broken concrete lamp-posts, flying buttresses made of the half-buried bodies of London buses and cars. Why had he never seen how beautiful it all was?

And sunken too. Multi-level! Multi-media!

Waters turned to his wife with the gleaming eyes of the convert. Motioning her to be quiet, he tiptoed to the scene of the burial. The great red circle lay at his feet like a red-rimmed eye.

When the interment was over, the family walked off in the direction of Regent's Park. Waters felt a strange exaltation at the sight of the cracked streets and collapsed, abandoned houses.

‘This is indeed the beginning of a new life,' he confided to Greta.

She nodded wearily.

There were no people anywhere.

The first rays of a cool sun poured through banks of brown cloud as they reached Regent's Park. Waters, in spite of his conversion, gave a tut of dismay. Queen Mary's rose garden, where he and Greta had so often walked – where he had decided, in fact, to leave his cruel and materialistic first wife – had disappeared under a great mound of dully gleaming metal. Not cars – so what was it? After the first shock, they ran towards it. A needle-thin shaft of sunlight danced over the acres of broken fuselage.

Crashed spacecraft? Waters's hand flew to his face in self-protection. Fall-out? A new interstellar virus escaping invisibly from the tortured cockpit? He walked cautiously towards it.

‘A Jumbo,' Waters's third stepson announced in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘T.W.A.' Adolf trotted up into the wreck and sniffed about in the remains of the galley, returning with a chunk of tournedos steak in his mouth. A smell of airline food accompanied him.

‘I'm hungry!' all the children shouted in unison. ‘Can we go up there, Daddy? Can we?'

Before Waters had time to answer, they were scrambling into the stomach of the crashed plane. Adolf snapped ferociously as the first-class passengers' larder was discovered, and its contents taken away from him.

‘It's not organic food,' Greta cried. ‘Darling, stop them if you can!'

But Waters was puzzling on the same problem that had confronted him all the way from Marble Arch. No people. No passengers on the plane. No one anywhere. He thought once again of the red circle. Had it come to suck all humanity from the planet, and missed out, by some extraordinary chance, the Waters?