by Tim Maughan
5. AFTER
Vibrations jerk Anika awake, and for the nth time she feels that fleeting half second of panic and disorientation, and then curses herself for nodding off again. Her hair sticks to her face where it’s been sandwiched between her skull and the van’s window, but she doesn’t move straightaway, the cold of the glass pressing against her forehead strangely calming.
She brushes aside enough of her fringe so that she can peer out the windscreen, just in time to watch the ancient shard of the Purdown communications tower slip past on the right-hand side of the motorway; its strange, distinctive stack of concrete disks still looking like abandoned Cold War space hardware, still transmitting nostalgic futures from its mess of long-dead aerials and dishes.
Fuck, she realizes, we’re here.
And she’s right, within seconds they’re hurtling down a concrete corridor, the motorway snaking down into northeast Bristol, and she feels her stomach flip, unsure if it’s the altitude drop or her nerves—another flash of panic, but minus the disorientation. She knows exactly where she is.
As if on cue the walls drop away and they’re on the flyover above Eastville, and through the grease mark her hair has left on the window she can, for fleeting, fragmented seconds, see into the rooms of the houses, can glance across the dome of the mosque. It always fascinates and horrifies her how close the top stories of the buildings here are to the elevated motorway, how if she could freeze time she could reach out and touch them, leap across onto someone’s roof, through someone’s open bedroom window, find somewhere to curl up and sleep. She always thought this, every time she drove back into Bristol this way, tired and wanting to get home, fascinated by the seemingly arm-length proximity to the road, horrified by whatever interpretation of progress was used to justify slicing through a community so brutally.
And then the buildings drop away, and for a second she’s disoriented again, until she twigs that she’s looking down on Eastville Park—or at least what used to be called that—the first thing she’s seen so far that seems to have changed in the last ten years, its green expanse of trees gone, flattened, turned into rows of crops, patchworked into segments too large to be community allotments or private vegetable gardens, and she sighs to herself, numbly fighting back the anger and disappointment.
“You’re awake, then, eh?” Neal flashes her a smile as he guides the van straight over the top of the Eastville roundabout, no need to pause for the nonexistent traffic. The roads have been basically empty since they left the services, and cleared everywhere—just the occasional abandoned car dragged onto the hard shoulder, the odd encampment of parked-up nomads.
“Yeah, must’ve nodded off again.” She forces herself to smile back at Neal, who seems mainly harmless.
“Well, nearly there now.” Past the silhouette of his head she catches a glance of the blue-and-yellow bulk of IKEA, the superstore looking mainly intact from up here. Now the towers are rising out of the mist to their left, gray and red brutalist monoliths, drying laundry flicking pixel-speckles of color across their faces. So little has changed, she thinks, although she can’t shake the feeling that something is missing, that there’s some stark, unidentifiable emptiness.
“Long time since you been back, yeah?” Neal asks her.
“Yeah. Long time. I got out just before things got bad.”
“Well … I reckon you picked the right time to come back. City is getting back on its feet, they say. Most people got power, most the time. They mainly got the solar back working, see?” He nods at the roofs of the houses to their right. “But it was tough for a while, yeah. Really tough. Wise decision.”
“Wise decision?”
“Staying away, until now. You made a wise decision. Things weren’t good, not for a long while. Better now though, mind.”
Anika looks back out her side window, unconvinced. Perhaps she’s left it far too long. Her stomach flips again, and then—as she stares at the empty spaces between the road and the buildings—she realizes what’s missing.
“The trees. All the trees are gone.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Well, like I say, was bad, first few years. Especially first couple of winters. Terrible, it was.”
Anika doesn’t catch his drift at first. “And … the trees?”
“Well, they burnt them all, my love.” Neal takes his eyes off the road to glance over at her with palpable sadness. “For heat.”
* * *
The next thing Anika knows, they’re off the motorway and slap-bang right into the town center, and she’s pushing herself back into her seat and holding on for dear life, her left hand grasping the door handle while the fingertips of her right try to pierce the seat’s upholstery as Neal guides the van through a mass of crisscrossing cyclists, trading curse words and hand gestures with them through his open window.
No motorized traffic at all, no cars or vans apart from them, just bikes. Fucking hundreds of bikes. Fucking hundreds of people, in fact, far more than Anika imagined—somewhere in her head she expected to come back to empty streets, abandoned buildings, silent postapocalyptic wastelands. But the opposite seems true, like the city has been pumped full of people, and all of them apparently on bikes right now, in the town center, trying to get run over by Neal’s van. And then—just as Neal narrowly avoids wiping out what looks like a whole family balanced on a single bike, a mother with a baby hanging off her, an older child sitting on the handlebars and a third riding pillion—something else hits her. They’re all so young. Children, mainly. Even the eldest faces she clocks as they whiz past seem to be barely out of their teens.
“So many kids,” she says.
Neal laughs. “Yeah. Well, I guess that’s what you get after a decade of no TV or contraception.”
Anika laughs back, nods. “How’s the life expectancy?”
Neal inhales hard. “Not great, to be honest. Hospitals are a fucking nightmare, can’t get to see a doctor, zero supplies. Seriously, anything happens to you, you’re best trying to sort it out yourself, you get me? So life expectancy … well, I dunno. I dunno an official age or anything. But put it this way—I live down in Hanham and I’m one of the oldest down my ends.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-five.”
“Ouch. You look like you’re doing all right, though?”
“Yeah … I guess. I try and look after myself, y’know? It’s tough, though. I mean, you never know what’s gonna come along, do you?”
Anika doesn’t answer.
“I mean … like I say, winters were bad. Still can be. A cold comes along and everyone gets it…” He stops himself, obviously pained. “I seen whole streets die, whole families. Not just the olds but the little kiddies, too. Just from a cough, y’know? I mean, it’s a bit better now, mind, now we got some food and that. Vegetables again, like. But still. Come autumn, someone starts coughing and you see the whole street paying attention.”
He cuts himself off by violently veering to the left, like he’s missed a turn, and Anika realizes that’s exactly what’s happened as he mounts the curb and punches the van through a hole in a nearby building. It takes Anika a minute to work out what the fuck is going on, but as they’re submerged in interior darkness she realizes they’ve just entered the Cabot Circus multistory car park. There’d been no indication it was there, she realizes, no street furniture, no signage, no entrance barriers. She wonders if they’d all been burned for heat too.
Next thing she knows they’re hurtling up the huge spiral ramp, and she’s gripping the seat and handle again—partly out of fright at Neal’s slightly too fast velocity, partly because the strobing effect of the sunlight as they spin past the ramp’s columns threatens to induce seizures. She closes her eyes to block it out, but then the dislocated motion of the climbing, twisting van turns her stomach and she opens them again, realizing just how unused to traveling in cars she’s become.
Then they’re off the ramp, and Neal finally seems to cut his speed for the first time since they left
Wales, easing them around pillars and parked cars—most of them looking to Anika like they’ve been here awhile, abandoned. Cars and vans much newer than the antique Ford they’re sitting in now: driverless cars, fuel-cell-powered, digitally controlled. Chinese, Korean, Brazilian designs. All useless now. Some of them have been stripped for parts, some have been burned out, others converted into what looks like living spaces; she catches the glimpse of curtain fabric in windows, notices how some of the cars have been moved to create walls, defenses. Security. It’s like a small town on this level, streets formed out of spaces between the abandoned machines, lit by repurposed headlights, paved with tarpaulin and piss and oil. She can smell it.
“Right, that’s the exit over there,” says Neal, pointing toward an impossibly dark-looking corner. “When you open the door I want you to just walk straight there, don’t stop and talk to anybody, right?”
“Right.”
“Oh, and I nearly forgot.” Neal turns to her, flashes his Jack-the-lad smile.
“What?”
“Welcome home, girl.”
“Yeah. Cheers.”
* * *
Neal makes her memorize the day and time he’ll be heading to Wales again, just in case she wants a ride, and then she leaves him to fend off the scavengers and traders clamoring to see what’s in the back of his van. She makes it to the exit unhassled, drops down a couple of flights of scruffy steps until she hits level three, makes her way past blackening walls and the broken shells of parking ticket and vending machines until she finds the curved glass bridge that leads over to Cabot Circus proper. She’s not actually been this way that many times, no need—never owned a car, and lived just down the road anyway—plus she always hated Cabot, a pointless, overcomplicated senses assault you avoided until you had no choice.
Despite her unfamiliarity, she doesn’t pause too long on the bridge, mindful of Neal’s advice—she stops just long enough to glance at the street below, surprised at how little has changed. The buildings, huge cubes of flat concrete, still stand, even some of their windows still intact, more drying laundry fluttering from balconies. At least they’re being used, she thinks, these redundant office blocks and hotels apparently repurposed as living spaces. Necessarily, it appears. The biggest change is still the bikes, flowing through the streets like floodwater—there’s so many of them, so many people, that it starts to spin Anika out as she watches them swarm below her, their unflinching movement and the bridge’s transparent curvature conspiring in vertigo. She closes her eyes again briefly, steps away from the rail, reopens them, and focuses on the floor until she reaches the other side.
Cabot Circus, third floor. It’s like stepping out into the upper level of a huge, angular amphitheater—Cabot always seemed ancient to Anika, like it’s stood here for centuries, despite her knowing full well it’s barely twenty-five years old. Before it was here Bristol’s central retail district was a disorganized mess, intersected by roads and traffic, meaning any shopping trip involved multiple road crossings, snarl-ups, gridlocks, and the occasional dead child. The obvious answer would have been to pedestrianize a chunk of it, but people—especially Bristolians, it seemed to Anika—loved their cars back then, so instead they demolished a chunk of it and built an out-of-town shopping mall in a middle-of-town space.
She leans on the railing, stares down into the pit lit by pale sunlight falling through the grease-smeared glass of the huge structure’s once-futuristic matrix of a roof, shadows projecting a faint grid onto everything below. Again she’s surprised by the sheer number of people—there’s a fair few wandering around on this level and the one below, but the ground floor is heaving, thick with bodies, a never-ending, swirling whirlpool of people. She smiles to herself, seeing the truth in Neal’s joke—you can try to starve a population, deprive them of health care, power, and data, but you can’t stop them fucking.
The smile grows into a self-deprecating chuckle; and she’s strangely embarrassed that part of her had imagined walking out into some huge abandoned space: a bourgeois science-fictional fantasy of a long-lost civilization where she’s the special one, the only survivor that could see past the crass commercialism of the masses and got out in time, the intrepid, educated explorer unearthing this forgotten, archaic relic of barbaric capitalism, an empty cave filled with unfamiliar, alien branding.
Instead, most of the branding has gone, ripped down from the fronts of shops and disposed of with the same startling ease with which the digital entities that owned them blinked out of existence, their physical manifestations grinding to a halt as the data that kept them alive simply vanished. Like a splintered army lost too deep into enemy territory, their supply lines were overrun and their troops had deserted their positions, going permanently AWOL as they slipped away into the surrounding forces.
But Cabot itself still remains, and, free of the branding and mission statements and retail management strategies, it seems, to Anika’s curiosity, to be flourishing: parents wander around in their charity-shop mélange of found clothes, dragging children in oversized T-shirts printed with images that have been long separated from their fleeting cultural significance—what they used to call refugee chic—stopping at the stalls that would previously never have been allowed to litter the elevated walkways that line and cross the complex’s central atrium. She finds herself heading down the steps of a long-motionless escalator to the floor below, eager to explore, drawn to join in, wanting to experience what appears to be the decentralized, community-driven anarchic economy they’d spent so many late, stoned, enthusiasm-soaked nights dreaming of in fevered, utopian discussions.
Instead, standing in the silence of the first shop she passes, she finds inevitable disappointment. For a start, the nameless store has barely any stock, and what is here is a disorganized mess of broken, discarded junk piled up in boxes or spread randomly around the half-bare shelving—at first glance she thinks it could even be the ramshackle debris left over from the original store’s ransacking, but soon she realizes the truth is even more depressing. For that to be true there’d have to be some shred of purpose, form. Between embarrassed glances she starts to think that maybe it’s just her own deep-rooted, bred-in consumer expectations clouding her assessment, so she tries to throw them aside and embrace the nonconforming landfill-mined chaos of scuffed plasticwear, broken crockery, torn clothing, dead electronics, and crumbling paperbacks—but it’s impossible. There’s not just a lack of organization here, it’s a total absence of function, value. She gingerly lifts an empty beer bottle from a detritus-strewn shelf, and where her fingers disturb its dusty surface they reveal glimmering deep brown, something she realizes she’s not seen for years. Sculpted, manufactured glass; industrial machine art designed to capture light and catch the eye. She can’t hold back the sense-memory-fueled smile, as she twists it in her hands, trying to ascertain the brand—but the label is gone, leaving behind no identifying traces on its surface, so blank that even the machine that made it would struggle to classify it, the only thing resembling a bar code being the streaks of white paper and residual glue left behind as the label was torn away.
Nobody has attempted to remove them, to clean them off, as though they still have some mystical value, some symbolic link to the label itself—the most valuable part. Disappointed, she replaces the bottle, and as she glances around the near-empty shop she realizes that the missing label is actually the center of all this, of what’s happening here. This isn’t so much a thriving, defiant artisan economy as a desperate clinging to the past, a once-significant tribal ritual still guiltily rehearsed by repentant believers, sneaking back into the same temple where they burned all the icons.
She leaves the shop, drifts anxiously along walkways, confused and distracted. Below, on the ground floor, the crowd still churns, more human bodies in one space than she’s seen in years, their combined mass emitting a constant low, dull drone, conversational white noise echoing off the empty architecture. There’s something restrained to it, Anika se
nses, as if something is holding it back, keeping it in check.
On the way down there she pauses where a group has gathered, and gently pushes through to see what they’re watching: a shop window full of color and movement, its entire frame filled with antique LCD televisions; the huge, bulky physical displays that had been going out of fashion when Anika was a kid, old enough to be unconnected, unsmart, uninfected. She still feels a curious thrill to see moving images again, despite the lack of sound, the low resolution, and the honeycombing effect the chicken wire lining the windows has, like she’s watching everything with an insect’s compound eyes. One screen is showing an old soccer match, another what looks like an ancient sitcom, the others all flickering with movies that seem familiar in their nostalgic anonymity: giant robots, space battles, food fights, car chases, period costumes. The kids at the front of the crowd giggle and point, whisper to one another. Scrawled in pink paint directly on the window, free of the chicken wire, is the first thing Anika has seen that resembles a sign in any way:
WE BUY SELL ANY:
DVD’S
BLURRAY’S
VHS
