So that is a problem.
They’re highly satisfactory, these binoculars. My vision is less than mighty – a moderate myopia of roughly -3.23 dioptres has necessitated glasses since childhood – so it is rather a treat to see distant objects so close up. There’s not much you can do about this ceaseless fog, mind you; I have not seen a clear skyline since 2018. I acquired them from a camping shop off Peckham High Street – 12x magnification, crystal-clear lens, nice and light but strong and solid, and well out of my price range, of course. There is no possible way I could have afforded them before.
They are, primarily, for the wildlife. Peckham is full of it these days, especially down on The Rye. Rats, mice, pigeons, cats, woodpeckers, chaffinches and those bright green parakeets that screech through the trees on the southern rim. Jimi Hendrix brought them into London during the ’60s, so it goes. Great fun to watch, and, what with them and three years of uncut grass and trees left to grow wild, the whole place looks like a jungle.
The woods are deep and dark now, full of fox stink, and I have spotted the odd badger there too. The squirrels are still as numerous as ever, and due to the warm winter we have, until recently, enjoyed, they are all fat and slow after a two-month binge on nuts. They cover every branch with their whirling, squirrelly blur.
Full of life. Sometimes I just sit and watch it all squirm and jump and flutter through these marvellous binoculars of mine.
But they are not merely for zoological observation. I use them to keep an eye on the lights too.
Beardsley was the first of them. It was the evening after I found my generator, Bertha, just over three years ago. The power had been down for weeks and, having made my decision to stay by then, I knew I had to take things into my own hands. Luckily I had expertise in these matters for I was a trained electrician in another life.
People say that, don’t they? In another life. As if life isn’t a single stretch of time but many of them: a series of befores and afters. We do have a queer way of looking at the world.
Anyway, I had just dragged Bertha up ten flights of stairs – and I am no Geoff Capes, believe me – so I was having a well-earned rest when I spotted a glint through the window. I thought I was seeing things at first, maybe because of the exertion. But no, there it was: a little glimmer in a dark mass of buildings about a mile north of our block. I took a closer look, thinking it might be just the low sun reflecting in a broken window, but it was definitely a light – steady and orange, electric, man-made. Another stay-behind, just like me.
Foolish of me to believe that I had been the only one.
I circled the light on the window with a marker pen and watched it all evening. When the light turned off my stomach turned. I did not like to think of whoever had made it out there, moving about in the dark and getting up to things.
It was there the next day, and the next, and the next, like clockwork: same time, same place, right under my mark. I made records in my book and, eventually, when I accepted that he was a permanent fixture, I adjusted the boundary on my map.
I had drawn my map long before the lights appeared, long before the fog descended, and long before all of this happened. It marks the streets to which I keep, and we should all have one if you ask me.
You only need a small space in which to live. I calculated it.
The surface area of the planet is 197 million square miles, with only 58 million square miles of this comprising land. Much of this land is uninhabitable, and people tend to stick to coasts and cluster in packs, forming cities, like London. London takes up 3,236 square miles and, when I drew my map, was home to 14 million individuals. This means that, if you split it equally, every square mile of London’s dirt would contain 4,326 people, with room for a little one.
That comes in at 716 square yards for every man, woman and child.
Of course, when you factor in public parks, private land, underground parking, tower blocks and all the places you just can’t go, plus the fact that you do have to give a bit of wiggle room, the equation for how much space you should move about in gets a little complicated. Plus I had a dog, so he needed space too.
In the end the borders of my map ran from Ada Road in the north-west to the bottom of Bremmington Park in the north-east, running south to Homestall road and west again to Calton Avenue. Two square miles. I consider this generous.
When I spotted the lights I brought the northern perimeter in a few streets, just in case I bumped into anyone.
I cannot touch people, you see? If I do, well, I get the heebie-jeebies.
This has not always been the case. For thirty years of my life I was perfectly normal, but then … well, when my affliction took hold I could see that it had the potential to make my life rather difficult. Two reasons:
a) I lived in London, an enormous city full of people, all with skin, all moving, all liable to get close enough to touch, and
b) I was an electrician, so I had to meet people fairly regularly.
But actually, in a place like London people keep their distance anyway. The only ones I had to be on the lookout for were handshakers.
Handshakers were mostly men in middle-class houses who offered you tea and biscuits while trying to talk to you from the corner. Quite why you would want to welcome a stranger sent to fix your fuse box in such an effusive way is beyond me, but there you go.
Whenever I sensed a shaker, I would stand well back from the door, tools in one gloved hand and a laminated sheet in the other explaining my condition. Once they had assimilated the information written thereon – generally with some amount of awkwardness – we would be safe to proceed.
So I stay within my boundary and I do not touch people. Those are my rules and, happily, the world in which I now live makes sticking to them rather easier than before.
Oh, and I cannot go near water either.
Before you ask: no, I am not insane. Water is dangerous, that is merely a fact. I can assure you, I am no lunatic.
Something has come over me lately, though, I will admit that. I do not really know what it is, but it is close, I can feel it, like breath down my collar. My thoughts keep winding themselves up in knots, the same ones again and again, reminders, things that might never have happened, or maybe they did, I don’t know, I just …
This is why I am writing my journal again.
I had a therapist, way back.
‘When your thoughts get too much,’ she said, ‘try writing them down. It might help, especially since writing is one of your hobbies. How is that novel of yours going?’
I did not like that word: hobby. Birdwatching, that is a hobby. Dog-walking too. Anything that takes your mind off things for a while. Eighteen years I have been trying to write this book of mine, and it does not feel like my mind is off anything. I just cannot seem to finish it; I do not know how. There’s this Duchess, you see …
But I digress. The lights.
Beardsley and I, it appeared, were not alone. Over the following weeks nine additional lights appeared, and I marked each one on the window and in my book. One night, as I worked on rigging the generator up to my flat’s electrical supply, I realised – with some amount of dread – that I was a little light too. They would see me, as I saw them.
I had to have a little sit down at that.
Would one of them come to call? Thankfully, the answer, so far, has been no.
The first light, the other nine and me: eleven lights in total. A bit of a gift, that number; I knew instantly how I would christen them. We would be the England squad from the 1990 World Cup semi-final against West Germany, 8 p.m., 4th July, Stadio delle Alpi, Turin – a game I have seen many times. We took Lineker’s namesake, of course.
But now, with Beardsley gone, it looks as if we are down to ten men. One less stay-behind. He shall have to be rubbed from the window.
You would probably say I was mad for staying. There is no electricity, no water, no refuse collection, little in the way of fresh food and no people. Mad – I know that’s
what she would have said.
So why did I stay?
Because leaving would have meant change, and that is something I like to avoid at all costs.
It came slowly, with little chinks appearing as if another reality that existed behind the curtain of our daily activity had decided to crawl through. It was nothing spectacular. You saw more heads raised than usual. More nervous eyes met on the street. Bus conversations went on louder and longer than was deemed normal and rang with words that made the ears of other passengers prick.
It was the year of an election – the last of its kind, as it turned out – and amidst the usual distant Westminster rhetoric you heard other voices closer to home. These were the fringe campaigners, supporters of strange causes echoing from a past most thought had been buried for good.
One day, after walking Lineker, I passed a long trestle table on the pavement that was piled high with leaflets and taped with printouts and photographs. I glanced at the middle-aged woman sitting behind it in her shawl and boots and, suspecting some kind of left-wing activism, quickened my pace.
‘Well hello, little Reggie H!’ came a familiar voice.
My boots scuffed to a halt and I looked back. The woman was standing now. She raised an eyebrow.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’
I frowned. Then it hit me.
‘Angela?’ I said, turning to face her. ‘Angela Hastings?’
I had grown up with Angela. At school she had been the heavyset girl with a loud mouth who commanded playground games. She had an unusual blend of precocious authority and mischief, and grew into an early developing, make-up-wearing, fierce-eyed teenager who tried everything before anyone else would dare. We were in the same year but different social groups – which is to say, she had a social group whereas I had none. She made fun of me. It was only when we were fifteen and she started going out with a friend of my brother’s, four years her senior, that we started moving in the same circles. She became a regular at the Wheatsheaf, where my brother took me when Mum needed privacy. As with most other boys my age, Angela represented a version of female sexuality you could not hope to attain and would be terrified of if you did. But we all thought about it anyway, sometimes, deep in the night.
She grinned and winked, and with a sigh she plunged her hands into her cardigan pockets.
‘It is you, then,’ she said. ‘My, my, it has been an age, Little Reggie. I think the last time I saw you was …’
She stopped and an awkward ripple crossed her face – a transitory expression which I had long ago learned to recognise as pity. She shook her head.
‘I was so sorry when I heard, Reggie,’ she said. ‘Really, I was. How have you been?’
‘I am just fine, thank you, Angela,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’
She nodded, smiled hopefully and looked down at Lineker.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see you have a dog.’ She kept her eyes on Lineker. There was a change in her countenance then, a tightening of her jaw which I remember considering extremely odd. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that can help.’
Lineker gave a low growl.
‘Lineker,’ I warned.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, looking up. ‘He can probably smell mine. I’ve got three at home, for my sins!’
She let out a raucous laugh – the same laugh I had heard many times from the corner table of the Wheatsheaf, where I had spent countless evenings sitting quietly in the shadow of my brother’s social life.
I looked at the table in front of me. ‘So, er, what’s all this about then?’
She sniffed and cleared her throat. ‘We’re campaigning to overhaul Rye Lane,’ she said, straight-necked and beaming.
‘What, you mean structurally?’ I asked. ‘Rooftops, tarmac, that kind of thing?’
‘No. I mean we want to completely change it. Rip out the phone shops, pound shops, stinking fish markets, the places selling substandard African goods … we want to restore it to its former glory, Reggie. Make a fine British street out of it again.’
I watched her, chin raised and face pinched with an unsettling mixture of pride and disgust. I hardly knew what to say.
‘That is quite an ambition, Angela,’ I said at last.
She shrugged. ‘We need to be ambitious if things are going to change.’
She motioned to the table.
‘You should take one, Reggie, educate yourself.’
I picked up one of the garish pamphlets and looked it over. On its cover was a cheap photograph of a man in a suit smiling.
‘And who is this?’ I asked, referring to the stranger who would soon be known the world over.
‘That, Little Reggie, is our future,’ said Angela, in a tone I had never before heard her adopt. It chilled me.
‘Is that so?’ I said. I was beginning to suspect that Angela Hastings’ sanity had, somewhere along the line, taken a wrong turn.
‘Why don’t you join us?’ she said with a welcoming smile, as if she was offering nothing more sinister than membership of a local church. ‘We can always use an extra pair of hands. Plus, we’re a sociable lot, you know.’
There was that awkward ripple again, followed by an encouraging nod. ‘It would be a great way to meet other people.’
I placed the pamphlet carefully back on the table. ‘I don’t think so, Angela,’ I said. ‘Thanks all the same, but I think I’ll stick with Lineker here. You could say I, er, prefer the company of dogs to people right now.’
I ventured a smile, but her expression had already darkened. Her sympathy, her brightness, her hope – it all fell away like dust. Beneath it was a stone-like glare. Lineker growled and this time I did not stop him.
‘Change is coming, Reg,’ she said. ‘Whether you like it or not. You can’t hide from it.’
I can, I thought. I can and I will.
‘Goodbye, Angela,’ I said, and left.
‘Bye, Little Reggie!’ I heard her call after me, her brightness somehow restored. ‘I’ve always remembered you – stay safe, now!’
Less than a year later a crowd watched as that first tank rolled into Peckham – its buffoon of a driver careering into the rail arch and bringing down the train that is still there to this day, covered in mud and creepers. By that time I had already lived in my flat for twenty-five years. I would not have been able to tell you the last time I had escaped the M25’s snaky coils, and I had not been north of the river for almost a decade. I wore the same clothes, read the same paper, watched the same telly and drank the same brand of tea every single day, without fail.
Then it all happened. I watched people howl and run from tanks and bombs and those chest-beating brutes in their purple jackets and golden plumes. I watched it all and stayed quiet; it was just another change, like a hurricane – devastating and treacherous, but it would pass. I would not let it take me with it. Not this time.
Change: something to avoid at all costs.
I was born in 1969, at almost exactly the same time that Mr Armstrong’s feet settled upon the moon. My mother said I should have been called Neil, but unfortunately my brother had already claimed that name. So Reginald it was, after nobody in particular. My dad had hightailed it for Ireland long before I was born, so it was just me, Mum and Neil, and our Nunhead flat.
I have lived in London all my fifty-two years, so have witnessed half a century of change swirling about its streets. I have seen roads break apart and snap together like a child’s train set. I have witnessed buildings rise and fall like dominoes, big and fat or sharp and spiky like broken bottles. Fashions have changed too – clothes, shoes, haircuts, scraps of coloured fabric slapped over each other, each one screaming it’s the best of the bunch, but it never is. Music, film and theatre; the next big things arriving in limos and tripping down red carpets with their faces all shiny and their nails as sharp as razors. People – they change the most. Friends become strangers, lovers become distant memories, children … children do what they do. Voices change. People’s
accents, the words they use and the things they say. Opinions, minds, feelings. Those things change faster than light.
Month after month, year after year, fad after fad, it all just goes on and on and on. Change, change, change.
It is simply not for me.
That is why I stayed, so things would not change any more.
You need very little to live. Shelter, food and water; they are the staples. You might argue that you need a bit of company now and then, maybe even a bit of the other. I need nothing of the sort and, in any case, sexual conquest is a young man’s game.
The basics, that is all you need; everything else is just dust.
We’re doing all right, Lineker and me. Bertha is thrumming away, the fuel store is healthy, plenty of bulbs, food and water, and the heating is doing a cracking job, even if I do say so myself. Good thing too because it is finally getting cold.
And I have my writing to keep me busy. Although this Duchess, she’s really starting to give me a headache. If I could just find a way to … I don’t know.
Like I say, something’s come over me lately. I don’t know what it is, but it’s drawing in.
Pack
LINEKER
Squirrels are cunts.
They are, though. Cunts, the lot of them.
Ooooh, if I could get my claws on one, what I wouldn’t do to that stupid, vacant, twitching little cunty face … it’s enough to, I tell you, it’s enough to …
I know, I know, I need to relax, it’s just … my head, calm down, Lineker, come on mate, chill out.
I’m fine. It’s all good. I’m sitting down. Calm, calm, calm …
This is my most favourite spot: by the window, looking out. It’s long and tall with a view of countless buildings stretching away into the fog. Sometimes I can see gulls flying between them in great flocks. They seem to move slowly from so far away, not like individuals caught up in their own instincts – squawking, pecking, fluttering and stinking like salt rats – but as a single thing, a tide rolling in slow motion. They’re not themselves any more. They’re part of something else, a bigger unit with instincts of its own.
The Last Dog on Earth Page 2
