by Claire North
A silver cigarette lighter, the glow of embers as she inhaled.
Charlie stared at her dumbly for a moment, then blurted, “What if Agnes and Jeremiah refuse to go?”
Her eyes flickered sideways, incredulity on her face. “Then we fucking tear the building down around them, are you kidding me?” She spun quickly on the spot, an idea now lodged and taking root, snatched the cigarette from her lips and with the burning end stabbed it through the air towards Charlie’s face, emphasising every idea as it formed. “Did you see the campaign they tried to run? Not just them—the entire estate. They got fifty-three thousand signatures on a petition to save the place, presented it to the council, tried to get it debated in Parliament, took it to the local newspapers, got eighty thousand Twitter followers and a Facebook campaign, and do you know what it counted for? Do you know what it meant at the end of the day? It meant shit. It meant fucking shit. And why? Because the deal was done and could not be undone; the papers were signed, the money was paid. That’s law. That’s the way the world works, and no amount of whining changes it. And you know what else? All the bad publicity they brought down on us, yes, it came, and yes, it hurt us—for a day. That’s how long the dirt clung, maybe a bit less. Twitter, Facebook, TV and internet news—you know how long a story stays up on a news website these days, unless it’s about some celebrity scandal? Guess. Go on—guess. Three hours. That’s how much we hurt. And then the world turned, and someone tweeted something new, and everyone retweeted it and moved on, and nothing fucking changes. That’s the world. That’s people power. That’s all it fucking means.”
And the Harbinger of Death stood silent in the street, before a twenty-thousand-pound face and a ten-thousand pound suit, his toes bumping against seven-hundred-pound shoes, and for a moment he thought he saw a figure behind this woman, this snarling woman whose smile now had vanished completely, lips curled and teeth bared—he thought he saw a figure, watching far off, who shook his head and walked away.
And Charlie looked into the woman’s eyes, and realised he had nothing to say.
(And in the great shopping mall, Famine stands outside the health food shop, and stares at the giant vats of protein shake, and watches the videos of workouts on the wall, and looks down again at the detox dietary supplements, and finds herself in the awkward position, for a rider of the Apocalypse, of not really knowing what to think …)
(On the coast of the Black Sea, War holds out his glass with a cry of, “Zdorovye!” and chuckles as the captain of the warship chinks back and smiles uneasily, pennants fluttering in the breeze.)
(In a clinic in southern California, Pestilence nods emphatically, her chin cupped in the palm of her hand, and says, “Oh I know! I know. I know! Vaccines are just about making money, at the end of the day …”)
And at the foot of Nelson’s Column, Death sits on his haunches by the beggar man, and drops some pennies into his cup and muses, “Tell me—would you say that the rise of contactless credit cards has changed the nature of your work?” and the man shudders, and makes no reply, for the rain has soaked through his coat, and the cold is settling on his bones, and no one has spoken to him for a very, very long time.
And that night Death rode a pale horse across the surface of the earth, and walked to the waiting boat with the barefoot migrants, and knocked on the bars of the prison door, and held up the chemicals to the light and said, “These look a little cloudy to me …” and snipped the umbilical cord of the newborn child and whispered, “I’ll see you some other day,” and held the hand of the widow as she lay alone, and laughed and laughed and laughed as the city burned and
Charlie said, “I should go home now.”
The woman—he hadn’t learned her name—smiled again, always, smiling, as if she had never done anything else with her lips in all her days, and took another puff of cigarette. “Tatty bye-byes,” she said, staring out to some other place. “Tra-la and all that.”
Charlie hesitated, thought of defiance, of rage, of spitting in her face, and instead hung his head, and walked away.
Chapter 36
Well I used to live in Mumbai, but actually, Mumbai, there’s such a disconnect between …
Paris. Proud of Paris, love Paris, and for my work it’s very …
Canberra. You’ve never been to Canberra? No. Neither has anyone else.
Birmingham, the Harbinger of Death explained. But I live in London now.
The others laughed, the Harbinger of Famine rattling her chopsticks against the side of her plate. They didn’t often get together, not like this, not the four of them, but sometimes for an earthquake, sometimes a tsunami, sometimes a rebellion or a bombing or …
“Sorry, sorry,” said the Harbinger of War. “I know I never get to come to your natural-disasters club, miss out on all the floods and the avalanches—Mosul! I spend just so much time in Mosul …”
“The taxi fares in that part of the world have become exorbitant …”
“My favourite hotel, such a beautiful place, but these days …”
“Trying to get Airbnb in Mogadishu. I said, no, you stay with the family, but you pay …”
“I thought maybe I should have a base, a house,” mused the Harbinger of Death, “somewhere to make mine. Maybe settle down one day, put down roots, a community, a choir, a place with little shops, people who’d know my name …”
Again, uproarious laughter, Charlie, you’re so funny, too funny!
“This one time, in Beijing, the smog got so bad that I …”
“… camels, camels are the most amazing creatures, it’s just …”
“Problem is, there’s oil underneath, isn’t there? Whenever the geologists turn up, that’s when I know we’re in for …”
“I saw a football game in Sri Lanka,” mused Charlie. “And there was this boy there with the most amazing left foot you’ll ever see.”
Afterwards, once the four of them waved off the UN convoy, and the Harbinger of War had gone to take a piss with a man from the Russian Embassy, the Harbinger of Famine turned to Charlie, put a hand on his arm and said, “You must choose the life you live at the time you live it, Charlie.”
He, confused, his face swept by the headlamps of the departing lorries, sodium at his back and wire fencing all around, stared into the older woman’s face. “Once upon a time, in India, the young men were all told to work hard, make money, build a house, be a soldier, be a man. Then they grew older, and married, and were soldiers no more, and ploughed the field and picked fruit with the children and taught them how to hunt. Only when they had done these earthly things did they retreat into the ashram or sacred grove, to think on life’s mysteries. They were always going to do this deed, they were always going to come to the sacred place, and always had the holy man within them. But before they were holy men, they were sons and fathers, until the time was right. You still have time, Charlie. You can still choose.”
Charlie tried to find something to say, but the Harbinger of Famine had spotted a medic from an NGO she knew, and to whom she had so much more she needed to say.
“Emmi? Emmi, hi, I’m sorry, I …”
“What time is it?”
“I’m sorry, I was just …”
“Jesus.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t … I’ll go away.”
“You’ve woken me up now. What the hell is wrong, Charlie?”
“I … I don’t know. I went to a housing estate and then a man called and there were drinks and there were people and … and one spoke to me, she said that … I’m very tired. I might be a little drunk.”
“You think?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … Sorry.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Bullshit, that is.”
“I’ll be fine, honest I will.”
“Work getting you down?”
“I thought … You wouldn’t think that this bit … but … I’ll call in the morning. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean
to wake you. I’ll … I’ll make up for it, I …”
“Charlie, listen it’s …”
The empty sound of the broken line.
Alone, awake in his flat in London
—his flat in London, fucking hell, what’s he ever done to make it his? Music collection around the floor, not enough shelf space, a chest of drawers shoved full of T-shirts from obscure football clubs, but anything else? Pictures, paintings, scratches on the walls, stains on the carpet, the wear and tear of a house well lived in—fuck that, not him, not here, not the Harbinger of Death …
Alone.
Awake.
In his flat in London.
The Harbinger of Death stared up at the slanted ceiling, and felt cold, even though after the ice, he’d thought he’d never feel cold again.
Chapter 37
“I’m not an actor, I’m a performance artist. Conventional theatre has given in to money, corporatism and money. Look at the West End—it’s all the same old stuff designed to please, to make people happy. Theatre should be powerful, it should be a tool for social change, it should make you question everything about yourself and the world you live in! I don’t think traditional plays do that. They’re just words written by middle-class white people about middle-class white problems. Look, I know I’m middle class and white, but I actually have things to say, stories to tell that matter. No, I can’t afford to pay you for your time. No, there isn’t any budget. You’ll have to make do. This kind of work—well, you do it for love.”
“… that’s not really what I had in mind …”
“If I had to choose between funding a theatre or building another hospital, it’s not even a choice, is it?”
“My voice is my tool!”
“Maybe you just don’t know how to be what I want you to be.”
“Are you the lighting girl? No, I don’t know anything about lighting. Of course, I’m sure you’ll do a great job, and I trust your artistic judgement and value your opinion. So I’ve written down exactly what we want, and my cousin is going to tell you how to …”
“Red lorry yellow lorry red lorry yellow lorry red lorry …”
“Personally I play as a thief-wizard fusion, usually with a weapon specialisation of short sword and maxed-out points in the elemental school. It’s great, just so much fun and really beautiful to look at, but is it art?”
Chapter 38
The day before they started demolishing the Longview Estate, the bailiffs came. They pulled out the furniture and left it in a pile outside the door, except for the bed, which was too big to fit in the raised walkway, so they dropped it down onto the concrete below. They smashed a picture—not on purpose, just because they didn’t really care about the handling—and broke some plates, and all the paper fell out of Agnes’s schoolwork files when the ring binder gave way, and fluttered up into the sky like feathers from a dove. Jeremiah sat mute on his old sofa outside the kitchen window. Agnes screamed and cried, and in the end the bailiffs called the police. In fairness to the cops, they were shocked—genuinely shocked by what they were seeing—but they couldn’t stop it, not now, the law was the law. A WPC sat by Agnes, once she had no more fight to give, and said, “Look, love, let’s get a van and let’s find a place to store this stuff, and we’ll find you a hotel and …”
Agnes Young looked up into the face of the pig, the filth, the fuzz, PC Plod, the law, and for a moment almost managed to see a human being looking back at her, but then the uniform got in the way and she looked down and didn’t speak, so the copper went to her grandfather, and eventually the pair of them hired a man with a van (exorbitant, demanded an extra £50 after he had a hard time parking), and found a storage centre with room to spare (not as badly priced as it could have been) and a hotel room for the night, and Jeremiah shook his head as he tallied up the cost of this day on a piece of paper and said, “I only get seventy-two pounds a week to cover everything … Will that stop, now I’ve got money for my flat?”
And the copper wasn’t sure, but wondered if maybe it would, if perhaps now that Jeremiah had savings and no roof above his head, the government didn’t regard his welfare as its concern.
And the world turns.
In a club near Whitehall, Famine chinked glass on glass, pale champagne sloshing against the rim, and said, “Ultimately, what is government for? It’s not about looking after people, we’re not the nanny state, that’s such an old-fashioned way to look at things …”
And in the empty car warehouse beyond the Thames Barrier, where river gave way to swamp, Pestilence drew doodles in the soft mud and whistled as the matches failed to strike in the empty oil drum, and the grey faces huddled tighter together against the cold.
Looking out of a newly opened fast-food joint two streets down from the Kremlin, Russian-style cooking only, none of this Western shit, War folded his blini tighter round its mushroom heart and chuckled to himself, singing under his breath, “… goes around, comes around …”
And in the Houses of Parliament, Death sat in the viewing gallery as the junior minister cleared his throat and began. “We have already done much in this Parliament to reclaim wasteful spending. Twelve billion pounds of working-age benefits; twelve billion pounds, that is what we must recoup to save other, vital services. The young must find work; we must cut back on this culture of supporting so-called disability claimants and housing allowances where the case is not justified; the new generations must learn to give, not to take, and I say to it, to it …”
And Death nodded quietly to himself, and remembered another time, a long time ago, when he had sat in the viewing gallery, albeit in a different building that stood upon this site, and heard …
“So much misery condensed in so little room is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived … however, not to trust too much to any sort of description, I will call the attention of the House to one species of evidence which is absolutely infallible. Death, at least, is a sure ground of evidence … here is a mortality of about fifty per cent, and this among negroes who are not bought unless (as the phrase is with cattle) they are sound in mind and limb … A trade founded in iniquity, and carried on as this was, must be abolished. Let the policy be what it might, let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition.”
Death had come then too, to listen to William Wilberforce speak, and the day slavery was abolished in the British Empire, the old man had cried, and the men had cheered, and Death had been pleased to perform his office that day, which was given in service to an idea, and the turning of the world, and the abolitionist had perhaps looked up and beheld him in the gallery above, and had smiled, and not been afraid.
War, a little tipsy, sings as he shuffles through the night-time streets of Tripoli, raising his empty glass to the sky:
“What goes around … comes around … what goes around … comes around …”
In London, Agnes and Jeremiah Young stood outside the flat that had been their home, as the last of their furniture was loaded into the back of the truck, and stared at nothing and did not meet each other’s eyes, and the bailiffs waited until the lock had been changed, then nodded once in polite farewell to the pair, and walked away.
No one came, no one was left.
Agnes had no more tears to cry; Jeremiah had few—so very few—heartbeats left to give. They rode in silence in the van to the storage place, and the driver refused to help them take their belongings inside, but a girl, a few months into the job, doing it to pay tuition fees, saw the two of them and heard their story, and she got her mate down from the office who fancied her and couldn’t wait for her boyfriend to finally leave her, and together they helped carry the Youngs’ worldly goods into a secure locker at the back of a building that had once been a car park, and when they were done, they gave Agnes the key to the padlock on the door and pretended to forget to charge her for this extra service, and went to close down the storage for the night.
<
br /> Agnes and Jeremiah stood alone in the middle of the rushing street as the sun went down, a small bag held in Agnes’s right hand with a change of pants, her mobile phone, toothbrush and her grandfather’s razor and shaving cream, and they had nowhere to go.
“Excuse me?”
The Harbinger of Death stood on the corner of the street, a bus grumbling behind him at the traffic lights, a one-legged pigeon hopping busily out of his way. He held an umbrella under one arm against the return of rain, and stood, heels together, back straight. The two turned to stare at him, no words left, silent in the sodium-soaked dark.
Why is he here?
He’s not sure he knows the answer himself.
“I went to the estate, but you were already … but I met a policewoman and asked if she knew what had happened, and she said you were … and so I came to see if I …” He stopped, looked down, then looked up and tried again. “I’m not here on business. This isn’t … I met a woman who said that … Look, I’m on a train out of the country tomorrow, and I won’t be back for at least three weeks. I have a flat, it’s … it’s not much, it’s … Whenever I come home it’s always very cold, at least it seems that way, it’s not … I think I’m trying to say, if you need a place to stay …”
His voice trailed off. He studied his feet, as the girl and her grandfather studied him.
Then he looked up, and for the first time there seemed something in his eye that was made of stone, and there was fire in his voice as he said, “Something human. Something good. If you want it, my home is yours.”
