by Claire North
Five minutes later, Charlie received an email from an old drinking friend, whose friendship had grown awkward down the years, with a link to Twitter. There, shared several thousand times and rising, was a picture of the side of his face, taken from the balcony above as he shuffled away into the night.
Chapter 31
“Maureen …?”
“It’s Dolly, actually, dear.”
“I’m so sorry, it’s a terrible line.”
“What can we do for you, Charlie?”
“I heard the radio, saw the picture …”
“Ah, yes! I wouldn’t worry about it, love. You know, the last Harbinger once found herself shoved onto a catwalk in Tokyo in the middle of a show. Did very well with it—strutted to the end, then back the other way, waved a little, everyone was very proud. Not sure what the promoters got from it, but then you never know how these people …”
“So I shouldn’t worry about it?”
“Not at all! Won’t be the first time people have got in a twist about the Harbinger of Death knocking on their door, doubt it’ll be the last. You know there was this one time, just before the Berlin Wall fell, and I mean we looked everywhere, we thought maybe the Stasi, maybe the Lubyanka …”
“Thank you, Dolly, you’ve been very helpful.”
“Any time, love, any time! How’s the weather in London? It’s been pissing like an elephant with cystitis up here in Milton Keynes!”
Voices.
As a student, Charlie had loved eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. In the library, on the train, waiting outside an office, he found the lives of others enthralling, fascinating. As Harbinger of Death, he still enjoyed listening, found that the words washed over him, soothed any doubts and fears after a difficult job, burned away …
… a child in a hospital in India, born without an arm and a leg …
… the cracking of the ice …
… bone feet on stone.
When you were listening to voices, you swam in a living sea, and the turning of the world cleansed all things.
Most of the time.
Maybe not this morning.
“I mean, who the fuck does he think he is, Death, getting involved in a political issue like this? Sure, we all know him, we all respect him, primal force of the universe and that, but really, if he wants to stick his nose into public affairs, then there are more appropriate channels …”
“If the Pope wants to come to the U.S., then he’s gotta understand the folks he’s dealing with here. You can’t say that trickle-down economics has failed, that’s just Marxist talk, that’s the Pope being the mouthpiece of left-wing liberals jealous of what we’ve achieved. Now I’m not saying he’s a bad man, but clearly he’s been got at by the environmentalist lobby, by gays and Zionists, by the communist conspiracy, and you know what, God may have made him infallible in religious matters, but when it comes to politics, he’s just a guy in a funny hat.”
“… yeah, I get it, I get where she’s coming from, but like, talking to Hezbollah? I was like, whoa, I mean, bombing isn’t working, but talking …?”
“I don’t feel the need to dignify that with an answer.”
“… a pig’s head! A pig’s head and he shoved his penis right into its …”
“God said thou shalt not kill. Shall you kill your unborn child in your womb?”
“Is this your girlfriend? Oh my God, she’s beautiful—you’ve done so well! She looks just like that actress—you look just like that actress—oh you must be pleased.”
“Yeah. She’s also really clever.”
“And are you two … you know … thinking of a day?”
“No.”
In his bedroom, carved into the slope of the roof in a small flat in south London, Charlie lay on his back as the rain tap-tapped on the skylight, and listened to music instead.
His newest CD was a compilation sold for approximately £3 a disc by the woman who ran his hotel in Nuuk. She’d put it together herself—with the consent of the artists, she swore—and with Greenland being the size it was, Charlie found it easy to imagine that everyone he heard was at the very least a distant cousin of hers, if not a close personal friend. The first two tracks were pop songs from the 1970s, sung in Danish in a style that was best described as Abba without joy. Then electric guitars started growing distorted, Auto-Tune arrived on the mixing desk, boy bands joined in some rough semblance of harmony and the songs became a mixture of Kalaallisut and broken English, ballads sung to forsaken love and low job prospects, electric zooms and swishes at the beginning and end of every phrase.
Charlie listened, and tried not to feel disappointment. The rain fell and his next appointment wasn’t for nine days. Sometimes it was like that—sometimes he’d fly twelve thousand miles in a couple of days, zipping across the continents without sleep to deliver this or that to Death’s awaiting appointees; sometimes nothing would happen, and no news would come, though surely Death continued to wander the globe, and children were born and old men died, while Charlie stayed at home.
He rolled onto his stomach, pulled out his mobile phone, flicked through his calendar. His next appointment was in northern Italy, a police chief suspected of being incorruptible, who’d retired early before his disease of moral correctness could infect the rest of the department. Charlie stared into the clean-shaven face of the man on his screen, and wondered what his fate would be. In another life, twenty years ago, he could have been a model with a jaw like that, but too much time as a copper had set his features into a frown, and now the only brands that would hire him would be men’s outdoor clothes, trying to tap into a macho market of account managers and insurance salesmen who knew that in another life they could have hunted bears with sharpened sticks, oh yes they could …
Now he was on Charlie’s visit list, and maybe he had a dodgy heart, maybe something genetic, maybe he’d said something a little unwise about some crime lord, or some gangster’s pet politician, maybe …
Charlie turned his phone off, rolled onto his back. Nine days. He could take the train to Italy; so long as he found an equivalent flight, claimed expenses only up to the same amount, paid for the rest of the journey from his own pocket, it could work. Eurostar to Paris, coffee in a bistro, sleeper train down to Venice, or maybe even the daytime service, the scenic route past Geneva, through the Swiss Alps, make it a proper trip, see if Emmi could come, when was half-term? Get away from it all for a while, get away from …
… home.
And other foreign countries.
The music changed. No more drums, no more electronics. An old man’s voice, speaking a language Charlie didn’t understand. A song he didn’t know, a tune he couldn’t replicate, hard to say if it had a key or obeyed any classical music rules. It came from somewhere far behind the singer’s nose, a strange, rattling sound that might perhaps mimic the song of the wind through narrow corridors of ice. Not a human sound, but an animal perhaps, a singing wild animal somewhere in the dark, a creature that stood upon a breaking glacier, that lamented its dying world, the falling white, the way the Professor ran towards the …
Charlie sat up fast, turned the music off. Went into the living room, turned the computer on, stared furiously at train times London–Paris, checked his bank account, put on easy Europop, valiant love triumphant at great odds, beautiful girls and hunky men, you are my sunshine, my moonlight, my fire, my ocean, my summer’s sky, my ice queen, my goddess, my warrior, my joy, my sorrow, my raspberry jam on toasted brown bread with the crusts cut off, my …
He chose his seats for the Paris train, moved over to the checkout, ready to buy.
The phone rang.
He answered, without really paying any attention.
“Charlie?” said a voice, familiar and far away. “Charlie, it’s Patrick.”
Chapter 32
They met in an office off Piccadilly. A long desk in the lobby was staffed by three people, none of whom seemed interested in dealing with Charlie until he’d st
ood at least five minutes before them, hoping for attention. When they finally decided to notice him, they took his name, his postcode, his photo, and a contact email address. Then they asked him to wait while they phoned up.
He waited on a sofa. To his right, a long bank of TV screens displayed the news, current stocks and shares, and the inspirational message of the moment.
Excellence is a never-ending journey.
Magazines were artfully fanned on the table, untouched. Barriers opened and closed quietly between him and the lift banks. When someone came down to find him, she was young, dark hair tied in a high bun, sharp heels clacking on the polished floor, ankles slightly unstable as she walked. There were two consoles controlling four lifts, and no buttons inside. Instead, you selected where you wanted to go in advance, and the console pointed you towards the lift you required. Inside the elevator, screens gave more helpful advice.
We take pride in service.
Customer satisfaction is our no.1 priority.
Ours is a loving corporate family.
“This is … nice …” he murmured into the awkward silence of the lift.
The woman smiled. “There’s two toilets for four hundred people.”
On the seventh floor, the elevator stopped, and Charlie followed the wobbling woman through two more sealed doors, which she opened with a badge hung around her neck on elastic. An open-plan office was revealed, the workers in straight rows, some wearing headphones, most silent, a computerised hush over all that could only be created from a lack of privacy leading to a lack of conversation. The same lamp sat above the same screens; the same stationery was in the same white pots on the same desks. Very few had bothered to personalise their areas; only one or two rebels in the furthest corners had thrown up calendar cut-outs of favourite actors, photos of smiling friends, a burbling child.
Numbers rolled across screens, and eyebrows drew together at their mysteries. No one looked up as the Harbinger of Death passed by, and he found himself feeling unclean in this pristine place.
A little bank of rooms, segregated by soundproof glass, lined a window looking out across the street towards more offices of more busy numbers. Inside a few of the largest, men and women sat round tables covered with notes, and flipcharts showed crude diagrams of numbers going up, numbers going down, numbers wobbling unconvincingly. In one room, a single A2 piece of paper pinned to the wall simply said: EXPLORATION.
At the end of this row, another glass room, like any other, with a white desk, white pencil pot, white pencils, and sitting behind this looking at a white computer screen, a man in grey and blue, no tie, a flash of titanium-white at his wrist.
Charlie didn’t recognise him at first, his hair combed, his shirt ironed, his shoes polished and bright. But look again, and there was the face he’d met on the ice, frowning at something Charlie couldn’t see. Patrick Fuller, busy man in a busy world, glancing up as Charlie opened the door, his face splitting at once into a friendly smile. Getting to his feet, firm handshake, Charlie, he said, so good of you to come.
“Mr. Fuller,” he murmured, sitting stiff on the edge of the seat opposite the corporate man’s.
“Patrick—surely you must call me Patrick.”
“Patrick. I didn’t expect your call.”
“Heard about you on the news. I was in town, and as you see …” A gesture, taking in the office, the computer, the empty walls, the bare floors. Charlie frowned, wondering what it was he was meant to perceive in this vacuum. “How have you been?” he added, riding quickly through Charlie’s confusion.
“Fine. Good. Fine. You?”
“Excellent, of course, keeping busy, you know how it is, but … excellent, yes, as always. You made it back from Greenland in one piece, then?”
“Yes.”
“Good! You should have let me give you a lift, but I understand how these things …”
“Milton Keynes covers all my travel expenses, but thank you. And on the glacier … thank you for that, too. For … I appreciate it.”
“Not at all. It’s not every day you are invited to see the end of the world by Death himself.”
“And did you see it?”
Patrick puffed his cheeks, an oversized expression for the question. “Hard to say.” He leant back in his chair, which pivoted back gently with him, huffed out his breath, gave a little laugh, as if relieved this tricky introduction had been handled, and then, in the brisk manner of a man sharing a familiar joke, said, “So—the Longview Estate, yes?”
Charlie, sitting barely on his chair, feet flat on the floor, heels together, toes pointing straight to the front. Patrick Fuller, lounging back in his executive throne. Two men in the same room, worlds apart.
“Yes?” he said at last, not sure what else was expected from him.
“You’ve been paying a visit—business, I assume?”
“Business. Yes.”
“Hope they didn’t take it too badly. There’s been a lot of problems down there, of course, you’ll have heard the stories.”
“They were … Are you here to witness again?” Charlie blurted. “On the ice you said you were to witness.”
“Yes,” mused Patrick, gently rocking the chair from side to side at the contemplation. “Yes, I was. But no!” The chair stopped, he leant forward quickly, steepling his fingers and smiling over the tips of them. “Not this time. Consultancy, mostly, the usual thing.”
“Consultancy?”
“For the developer. Investment, that’s what we do. Usually we do large-scale infrastructure—electricity, water, telecommunications—but sometimes housing, corporate, you know the kind of thing. I was in town, and I heard about your visit to the estate and I thought … well. There’s someone I know. And your boss, of course, never far behind. Like a garbage truck at a picnic, yes?”
“That’s not how most people describe him.”
Patrick’s lips smiled, and his eyes did not. Then again, leaning back, every motion he made, every twist and lean and turn of his body, a punctuation mark, a line break, a new idea about to be fulfilled. “I’ve thought a lot about what happened on the ice,” he said briskly. “At the time I didn’t understand it. The old man … it was very sad, but I thought … The message said the end of the world. Death invites you to witness the end of the world—no, the end of a world, I think that was it, very important distinction of course, very important; there I think hangs the rub. I thought, what the hell is he playing at, dragging me out here to see—with all due respect—a man die like that, I mean, what the hell? But I talked to my wife about it—”
“You’re married?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“She’s in the States, that’s where I’m based, of course, most of the time, but work is—you know how it is. Anyway, I talked to my wife, told her about the old man and the glacier, and do you know what she said?”
“No.”
“She said, ‘Of course you saw the end of the world. A man died, and his world is over and will never live again.’ Do you think that’s what Death intended? Do you think it was a lesson?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Come, come, you’re the Harbinger, the one who goes before, you must have views!”
“I am … I am the bridge. I am … I hadn’t ever seen someone die. I mean, I’ve seen … When I was younger, my father died, but it was slow. I was there at the end, and I saw … As Harbinger, you arrive, and you go before, and then you leave, but on the ice, for the first time, I saw Ule die and Death was there.”
“By which you mean …”
“Death was there. He stood on the ice. You didn’t see?”
“No, I was rather preoccupied. Death himself, the actual …?”
“On the edge of the glacier. He vanished when the ice cracked. He’s … unmistakable.”
“I imagine. Maybe I can’t, maybe that’s a lie, maybe I … but maybe I can, at that. And now Death sends you to a housing estate in Kennington.”
“Yes.”
“For the old man?”
Charlie flinched, wasn’t sure why. “I don’t know.”
“You gave him a gift, didn’t you—that’s something you do?”
“I did.”
“May I ask …”
“No.” His answer, harder than he’d intended, surprising himself.
Patrick smiled again, a default expression that should have been something else, and which time had trained into a neutral smile, and made meaningless in the process. Seeing it, Charlie felt again the cold of the ice, a weight dead in his bones, and wondered what Death felt when he walked upon the earth, and what Patrick would see when he beheld him at last.
Then Patrick said, “Charlie. I was asked to talk to you. By some of my partners. This business with the estate, the girl, the old man … it was all in hand and then the Harbinger of Death comes and … Whoever said that business and pleasure can’t be mixed clearly was in the wrong business. It’s good to see you again.”
“You too.”
“Dinner. I’m having drinks with some people who I’d love you to meet.”
“I don’t …”
“Charlie, we were both on the ice. Please. When you tell people that you are the Harbinger of Death, how do they react?”
“Depends.”
“For the most part?”
“The young are more frightened than the old.”
“Do you have many friends—forgive me, impertinent question, but I thought …”
“I have …” Charlie stopped, smiled, looked away. “I never had many friends. That’s me, I think, though. It’s just … me.”
“But the job …”
