The smell is terrible. The rats show no fear as I walk amongst them. Good luck to them, I say.
As I walked, I heard the roar of a large crowd not too far away. People were shouting. Or screaming perhaps? On any other occasion, I would be taking my boy towards them – towards people – in the hope that there was food and medicine. But I trust no one anymore.
We are on our own.
I found the large Tesco still there on Tottenham Court Road. I knew it would have been emptied of food during the London riots but curiosity compelled me to go inside anyway. The automatic doors had been pulled off and I walked through the gap that had been left in their place.
Oh God, the smell. Everything stinks in this place. It smelled like rotten fruit for the most part, but something else too. I had a terrible feeling and so I moved quickly, scouring the naked shelves for a hint of something – anything that was edible. I tried the tinned goods aisle. Nothing. The shelves had been overturned and everything taken.
I passed through the confectionary aisle – more to reminisce over old pleasures than out of genuine hope.
And then I saw her.
She was sitting in the middle of the aisle – a young girl of about eleven or twelve. She had filthy, lank blonde hair that went all the way down her back. She was barely dressed too, except for the ruin of a summer dress that barely clung to her emaciated body.
She was sitting down on the floor with her legs crossed. It was a while before she even noticed me standing there. Well how could she? She was too busy eating her own fingers.
I say fingers, but all that was left were ten gnarled and bloody stumps. She had gone through them all. And there I was, watching as she continued to pull the fleshy tips off those stumps like they were no more than gummy bears.
Eventually she saw me. Good God – my blood ran cold. It was like the monster in a horror film looking back at me through the TV screen. Was I supposed to say something? Old rituals of civilisation had never seemed so inappropriate.
Then she smiled at me. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. It was only when she started laughing and pointing at me with the dregs of her bloody fingers that my legs recalled the ability to run. And I ran home through the dead streets of London, not stopping until I was back with my boy. Back, but empty-handed.
Robbie is lying beside me now. I don’t ever want to leave my home again. When my son dies, I will have no reason to live.
He folded the sheets of paper and put them back in the faded envelope. Then he walked over to a set of drawers opposite the bed and opened up the bottom one down. Inside were dozens of envelopes of different sizes, shapes and colours. The drawer was bulging under the weight of all these letters – the voices of London past.
He pushed the other envelopes down, flattening them to make room for the last words of Jonathan Hearn. Closing the drawer, he went back to the window and pulled a shortbread finger out of the packet.
Alba walked into the room. She jumped onto the dishevelled bed and immediately started kneading on the sheets.
“Hey,” he said. “Have you been in the house all day?” He walked over and ran a hand over her soft white fur, down her back and up the luscious tail. She purred in appreciation.
“You want to go outside?” he asked. “Want me to open a window downstairs for you?”
The little cat’s response was to curl up on the bed and close her eyes.
“Staying in?” he said, smiling at her. “I don’t blame you.”
Chapter 5
He walked back down the garden path of yet another house that hadn’t delivered. It was the third property he’d tried that morning with no luck – an Edwardian house, its pristine white exterior intact, and the glass in its bay windows remarkably unblemished by the passing of time. This was one of several houses in the same row of terraced housing that his home was adjoined to. He’d even knocked on the door at first – that had made him laugh out loud, as if he expected someone to actually appear and answer him.
But here he was – three houses down and still no fridge. And to top it off, it was another scorching day in the city of London.
It had been the exact same with the first two houses – the ones that were positioned on either side of his home. He’d tried the doors and of course they were locked. Then he’d walked to the end of the block of terraced houses, jumped a brick wall and landed in the back garden of the furthest house down. After that he’d climbed several fences and located his own garden so that he knew exactly where he was. Then he started around the back of the next-door neighbour’s house. Start as close as possible, that was the plan. If he was going to be dragging a fridge out of any of these houses on Stanmore Road, he wanted it to be the one nearest to his house.
He’d walked towards that first house, traipsing through a small rectangle of grass and weeds that had grown to at least five feet tall.
He peered through the back window into a deserted living room. He saw a cream coloured sofa and two armchairs, spread across a room covered by a dull white carpet. A circular coffee table sat in close proximity to the sofa, on top of a small psychedelic coloured rug. There was a flat screen TV mounted on the wall and in the corner of the room there was a plastic pot with rotten debris hanging over its edges. Apart from the withered corpse of this rotten plant, the room looked normal. The owners could have been out for the morning, at work or running errands in the city.
He tried the back door and it was locked. There was nothing else for it – he’d have to break the glass. Fortunately he’d noticed a small pile of bricks lying on this side of the wooden fence, half-buried under the towering grass.
Tossing a brick through a window – little had changed since 2011.
He found the brick and threw it at the window. He winced at the high-pitched smashing noise as the glass caved in to the force of the missile. After this, he stood silent for a moment waiting to see if anyone or anything would respond to the noise.
As he stood waiting, he thought about yesterday’s encounter at the New River. Something was still nagging at him and surprisingly enough it wasn’t the act of killing another human being that troubled him. What bugged him most of all was the fact that he’d found another person wandering in the neighbourhood. His neighbourhood. For so long, this area had been his place and even if others had passed through they hadn’t lingered and there was no contact with them. All that changed yesterday when the savage gatecrashed his routine.
Hopefully it was just a one-off.
Stepping forward, he slipped his hand through a jagged gap in the glass, reaching for the handle on the inside and hoping it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t. With a sigh of relief, he released the handle and pulled the broken window outwards.
He climbed inside. A terrible odour shot up his nostrils. It was something ungodly and he covered his nose and mouth with his hand, pressing down as hard has he could. He would suffocate rather than inhale that again.
“Hello?” he said in a muffled voice. “Anyone here?”
Idiot. There’s no one here. There’s been no one here for years. Now stop knocking on doors and talking to ghosts.
The only way to get through it was to keep moving. Don’t linger, he kept telling himself. So he didn’t. He hurried through the living room and into the hallway, his eyes searching for the kitchen.
The kitchen was on his right hand side. The door had been left open and he could see inside the narrow room. There were bugs everywhere – flies buzzing, cockroaches crawling across the worktop and all sorts of other creepy crawlies that had made a home here.
He walked inside. He might as well have been walking into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. This was a terrible place. Approaching the white fridge freezer at the far end of the room, he buried his mouth and nostrils into the flesh of his forearm. He opened the door. The light was off – it wasn’t working. That should have been enough to send him on his way but he stood there, some part of him equally fascinated and horrified by the contents of the fridge. It ha
d been full when the house was abandoned. It might even have looked good once, but all that was left now was a pile of gut-churning waste. The walls of the fridge were covered in dark spots of purple and green mould. Something that might once have been yoghurt had fallen to the bottom shelf and had congealed into a shapeless grey mound that looked like Kraken vomit. The flies couldn’t get enough of it.
He felt a lurch in his stomach and slammed the door shut.
The fridge was still hooked up at the wall and switched on, which meant that it was either a fuse or that the appliance itself was a goner. Given the state of its interior and the prospect of cleaning it out, he was happy to let this one go anyway. Still covering his nose and mouth, he hurried back to the living room window and climbed outside. He fell onto the long grass and lay there for a while, his lungs grasping at the fresh air like a drowning man reaching for a life raft.
It had been a similar story with the next two houses. Smash the window, climb into a ghostly interior only to have an encounter with the fridge from Hell. After that he’d returned out the front door of the third house and onto the street for a break – there was no way he could take that smell again so soon.
He decided to lie down in the middle of the road for ten minutes and bask in the sunlight.
No wonder he’d stayed away from the other houses in the street all these years. He’d never needed anything in the early months after Piccadilly – there was enough food at home to last a long time and everything appliance-wise was working fine. Then by the time his own supplies had started running low he’d developed a peculiar fear of the empty houses that surrounded him. It was almost as if they were the incarnation of everything terrible that had happened. They were so still and quiet – a cruel reminder of all that was lost. They were giant, cursed idols – something to be respected but avoided.
But now he couldn’t avoid them. He needed a fridge. There was no way around that. It was something he couldn’t possibly go without if he wanted to stay where he was. And the thought of leaving home and venturing out into the rest of London was the one thing that frightened him more than breaking into the empty houses.
With a sigh, he got back to his feet and looked at the row of untouched houses.
House number four. He looked around at the weed-infested garden, two doors down from where he lived. As he approached the gate, he recalled seeing the family who had once lived in the house. He remembered the woman of the house, an attractive blonde lady who had tended to the garden at every opportunity. How neatly she’d kept it too, with its charming display of potted plants and garden gnomes, all of which were now buried under a tall blanket of weeds.
Whirr-Click.
Ignoring the sound, he threw open the gate. He walked down the path to the house. He tried the handle and to his surprise, this time it was unlocked.
As he walked in, he braced himself but still the odour caught him unawares. Something different this time. Filth and decay, but it was also distinctive and even sickly-sweet. It wasn’t just rotten food and the scent of decay. It was a peculiar, yet disgusting smell. Stepping forward, he realised that it was at its most potent around the staircase. He looked upstairs – fearful of what was up there, but also curious.
Once again, he covered his nose and mouth with his arm. Before he knew what he was doing, he had started up the staircase.
You’re not going to find a fridge up there.
Too late. He reached the top of the stairs and stepped onto the landing. The bathroom was directly in front of him and walking inside, he saw and heard the flies everywhere – hundreds of them. The toilet seat was lying open and there were bugs crawling around the interior as well as inside the bathtub. Brown mould dotted the white walls like unimaginative graffiti and damp patches clung to the ceiling.
There was a closed door to his right. Trying to ignore the fear tingling in his legs, he moved towards it, all the while trying to avoid the giant cockroaches at his feet. He forced himself to take a gulp of air, but it was so hot and disgusting inside the house that he was sure he’d pass out.
With a trembling hand, he pushed the door open. Inside the room, the curtains were pulled shut and everything was shrouded in a grey darkness. But he could see well enough to make out the decorations that someone had once put here. The wall was plastered entirely with posters featuring a variety of pop stars – the names of which he’d almost forgotten but not quite. Jessie J and Katy Perry – they were two of them at least.
He walked further inside the room. There was a single bed, which had been left neatly made. A flat screen TV sat atop a chest of drawers. A small stereo flanked by two tiny speakers was on the floor, surrounded by a pile of CD cases. The wardrobe door was lying half-open. He looked inside and found a treasure trove of female clothing inside – dresses, blouses, t-shirts and jeans – all hanging in perfect symmetry.
Thinking back, he tried to remember the girl who’d lived in this house. Hadn’t he seen her walking past the window of his home on a regular basis? She had probably been about his age give or take a year. Gradually her face returned to him – she was blonde and pretty – a miniature version of her mother, but with a shy demeanour. He remembered now. She had always looked towards the ground, so intense, as if she was concentrating on something – on solving some unseen crisis that existed in her mind. She’d had the studious look about her – a bookworm perhaps, but she was cute and instinctively he’d liked her.
He closed the bedroom door and walked along the hall to the next bedroom. Opening the door slowly, he peered into a room that had been turned into a shrine to Tottenham Hotspur football club by its occupant. The wall was covered in this one too but instead of pop stars, there were posters of Spurs team members past and present on all sides. The carpet was spotless but he noticed that a variety of Dr Who memorabilia had been placed on the top of the chest of bedside drawers like a mini exhibit – the Tardis, several manifestation of the Doctor, Dalek figures, and other characters from the seminal science-fiction show. All of them covered in flies.
He couldn’t remember anything about the other kid who’d lived here. Her little brother perhaps? A sister who’d been mad about football?
He stepped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him.
There was one room left at the end of the hallway. He stood outside the closed door, brushing a swarm of flies from his face. Somehow he already knew what was in there. Still, he pushed the handle down with one hand and covered his nose and mouth with the palm of the other. The hinges made a terrible creaking sound as the door swung open. Inside the curtains were shut and the interior was mostly cloaked in a murky grey darkness. But a few shafts of light were coming through a chink at the window, shooting thin golden beams across the room, allowing him to see what was in there.
They were huddled together underneath the bedcovers – all four of them. Heads and fragments of shoulder were the only thing visible and the rest was hidden underneath the sheets. But he could see enough of their faces to tell that they no longer had faces. The insects had made short work of their rotten flesh and the four skulls had been picked clean over the years.
The two adults were lying on the outside and the children were tucked in between them. That’s how they’d chosen to die – together.
He stood at the door, his eye fixed upon a few remnants of hair that were still attached to one of the middle skulls. Blonde? He wasn’t sure, but he tried to picture that girl’s studious, concentrated expression upon that empty face. To imagine her walking past his house – going to the library or wherever it was she had gone in 2011. Perhaps they would have been friends if things had turned out differently. Perhaps more than friends. She might have been exceptional at something. She’d deserved the chance to find out.
There were bottles on the bedside cabinets. Empty pill containers and dark glass bottles sat side by side. His best guess – they had used a combination of poisons to ensure a certain death. The children first and then the adults.
&nb
sp; He looked at them, unsure of what he was supposed to do.
By now, the heat was unbearable. The rancid smell wasn’t helping either. With one last look at the dead family, he shut the door behind him. Then, brushing the flies away, he hurried along the hallway towards the stairs. He’d had enough. Fridge hunting was over for today. He’d try again tomorrow but for now he had to get out of this godforsaken tomb and back into the sunlight.
He stopped at the top of the stairs. There was something outside. A noise.
An engine? It was an engine. He could hear an engine outside – not somewhere in the distance but directly outside on Stanmore Road. Could it be? Could it be the maintenance people? Had they come to do some repair work on his street? Perhaps they were coming to fix whatever it was that kept making that whirring and clicking sound.
He hurried downstairs, two or three steps at a time, but stopped at the front door. His hand reached for the handle but something held him back. It was as if some part of him was reluctant to go through with this. But listen. It was an engine. There was no mistaking it. A car? A truck? His heart was on fire, his mind racing back and forth, filling with questions. If they saw him would they take pity on him? Would they take him out of London? If they realised that it was just one guy living alone and no one else then they’d probably be willing to help him. Wouldn’t they? What harm could it do to take one person out of London?
But what if it wasn’t somebody from the outside?
That’s what’s holding you back.
What if it was a gang of flesh-eating cannibals? An entire squad of suited monsters like the one he’d tussled with yesterday at the river?
Who drives a car in London anymore? Did people still drive cars on the inside of the walls? Where would they get the fuel? If someone had gone mad with hunger to the point of eating human flesh, were they still capable of everyday things like driving a car?
The Future of London: (L-2011, Mr Apocalypse, Ghosts of London) Page 26
