But the real party started a little later, with you. You’re the one who rocked up at midnight with some strippers, a box of pills and a flamethrower – and now everyone’s dancing properly.
Two-minutes-to-midnights, that’s you, and look at all you’ve done with that bonce of yours, will you? Just look what you’ve done! You should be fucking proud of yourselves! You and your wonderful brains. And still, you worry. You spend lifetimes thinking of new things to worry about, like the tides, and the ice, and the heat, and whether you should have ever crawled from your cave at all. Worry, worry, worry.
Right now, I’m looking at a worried man, and he’s sitting on a chair by the door, peering through the eye glass.
Can I just say one thing? I don’t want to be a dick, but … fuck it, look, it’s like this. You seem like a stable person. You probably have a few hang-ups, you know, things you regret, relationships that went sour and all that, but you still know you’re not a lost cause. Right? You know there’s good in you as well as bad, and you try your best to find that good in most of what you do, even though you know you’ll probably fail. You put yourself out there, and generally you try to make a good impression on everyone you meet.
Now, you might not always see eye to eye with every soul – some people rub you up the wrong way and that’s fine – but you recognise that they’re fighting the same battles as you, on some level, every day. So you cut them some slack, as they do you.
But now and again, once in a blue moon, maybe only once or twice in your life, you will meet somebody who makes you wonder, seriously, how bad a life sentence would be. It might be at a party, or at work, or on a plane, or on the other end of the phone, but you’ll know, just know, without them even speaking a word, that you are going to want to kill them. And you can see it in their eyes too, hear it in the crackle of the telephone – they hate you, despise you, the very shape you make in the earth is one which they want to eradicate. They, like you, see this clear and terrible fact – that you are exact opposites. It doesn’t matter about evolution, or the brotherhood of man, or common battles any more. The only thing you have in common is a belief in a single opposing truth: the other one should not exist.
And then they do speak, and it’s worse than you thought, and then you don’t just want to kill them any more; you want to destroy them. You want to desecrate them. You want to take every nerve in their body, every fibre, every atom, and collect them together into a nice neat box so that none of them can escape, and then you want to piss all over them. And then you want to take that piss-drenched mush, bag it, carry it way into the desert and burn it with lizard bones and witch shit and the tears of the damned and you’ll dance around the flames, laughing, until there’s nothing left but a stain in the ground which you spit on.
That’s cats, that is. That’s how I feel, every time I see or smell a cat.
So that’s why I had to chase that fucker who sprang out of the sofa at us. That’s why I had to chase it away until I was sure it wouldn’t come back. Eventually it found its way out of a window and onto the guttering, then jumped across to the block next door, and I would have chased it further – would have chased it back to where it belonged, in fucking hell – but I remembered Reg.
I felt bad for him. He’d had a fairly shitty day, by all accounts, and now I’d gone and left him alone. So I went back and found him eating his dinner, and what did he do? He gave me some of it. Love him for that.
Anyway, there we were afterwards drifting off to sleep, me letting the taste of that wonderful stew work away the last scent of that cunt, when I heard a noise. It was a thump. I sat up, trying to hear over the sound of Reg’s snores. Nothing for ages, then … there, a thumping noise again. I gave a little twitch and growl and Reg sat bolt upright because he’d heard it too. We looked at each other in the dying light of the candles, waiting for the same thing. There again – three thumps this time, followed by another sound: a whimper in the stairwell.
Reg jumped off the sofa and I leaped to the door, barking, barking, barking. There’s a point where the door and the wall and the floor all meet in a little triangle, and in order for the door to open I have to bark at it, stick my snout right in there, so that’s what I did, as Reg peered through the eye glass into the dark stairwell. Eventually he went to get his flashlight and opened the door.
And when he did, even I froze, because there in the corner, curled up in a ball, was a child.
It was a female. I could smell her before the beam lit up her face; something like new grass and milk. But voles too. I got a lot of voles from that little girl.
I felt my senses tug and went to run for her, give her a little lick, see what she was all about, but Reg caught my collar. He dragged me back inside the door and told me to stay. I’d been listening to him very hard that day, trying to make him happy after my late start that morning, so stay is what I did, despite every fibre in my being making me want to jump across that hall and get a taste of the thing that was huddled there, voles or not.
I looked up at him and waited for his next move. The little girl blinked in the bright light, but Reg just stood there in the doorway, breathing hard. I saw his eyes pulse, and then I realised – voles. Reg was scared too.
He took a step back and slammed the door shut. Then he pulled a chair up close to the door and sat on it. He’s been there ever since.
Worriers, you lot.
I have to admit, though: here in this corner, watching Reg, my two-plates, my master, my world, behaving in a way I’ve never seen him behave before – I’m worried too.
Fear
REGINALD HARDY’S JOURNAL
6TH DECEMBER 2021, 1:21 A.M.
She is just a child. She is harmless. I have nothing to fear.
I put a chair in front of the door and my flashlight on the floor so that the beam spilled through the gap and out into the stairwell. Then I sat down and I waited. Every minute or so I stood up and checked through the spy glass to see what she was doing. The beam spread in a dim arc across the stone, so even with the starlight I could only make out shadows shifting.
That is another thing – starlight. Before, all you got was the moon and a few pinpricks here and there in the sky; the glow from 20 million lightbulbs made sure that anything else was obscured by an orange spray. Now the universe wheels above, unmuffled by artificial light. Only the fog muffles it, but if it is low I sometimes sit on the roof with my binoculars, trying to pick out constellations I can dimly remember the names of, getting lost in the flickering, distant lights and imagining I can see faces and arms extending from them. On a good night the streets and our stairwell are bright with them all.
Not tonight, though. All I could see was the bundle in the corner. I could make out the pale skin of her tucked-up shins and what I thought might have been her ear. She was quite still, barely breathing.
Later, without warning, her face turned to the door, nodding lightly in time with her heartbeat. In a second she shuffled and made little grunts as she moved along the wall towards me.
I fell back and pushed myself away from the door on the chair, gripping the arms.
She is only a child, I told myself. Be reasonable, Reginald, you have nothing to fear.
The shuffling sound had stopped. Carefully, and pretending to myself that I was not shaking, I got to my feet and crept to the twinkling spy glass. I pushed my eye towards it, then jumped back in fright as the girl’s face filled it. She was standing right there at the door, lit from beneath in my flashlight’s glow. Her face was bony and scared, her eyes wide and flitting about like flies. She kept her hands clasped to her chest as if they were her only protection against the dark.
I sprawled back on the floor and Lineker jumped over, licking my face to check I was all right. I pushed him off and stood up, breathing hard, watching the door and listening.
She knocked three times, slowly. I jumped again and Lineker barked, tail wagging, panting as he always used to when somebody came to the door. He snuffled
around at the gap where the light was shining through, and I could see the shadows of the girl’s feet disrupting the beam.
Then she spoke. It was barely a whimper; half a word croaked and cut short by a dry throat, but I staggered back yet again, terrified. I imagined her there on the other side, moving from foot to foot with her face up against my door, hungry and cold – wanting, needing, demanding. A chill prickled through me, draining all the warmth from my blood. It was already freezing in the flat, it being winter and Bertha having been off all day.
Bertha. She was out in the hall and if I wanted to fix her I would have to go out there, go past her. And that was not something I wanted to do in a hurry.
I imagine you are asking yourself: Why? Why is Reginald so afraid of a little lost girl? The answer is simple: because I knew what she wanted from me. It was what every child wants: protection. That is why I was afraid.
Another knock and another whimpered word. Her voice made a dreadful echo that seemed to rouse the wind outside. It moaned back in despair, worrying its way down the street. I pulled myself straight, telling myself to get a grip. She was just a child, after all, and the door was firmly locked.
Lineker barked back at her. His eyes twinkled with yearning in the flashlight. I took a sharp breath and stared at the door.
‘Go away,’ I spluttered. I caught Lineker cocking his head.
‘Go. Away.’ I said, this time clearer.
She shuffled, her shadow still dancing beneath the door frame. Finally it stopped and I sensed her departure. My lungs emptied. Lineker dropped and padded away, stopping as he reached me and looking up, tail still.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Just don’t.’
I made for the window, opening one curtain. Outside, the city’s ruined geometry rose from the fog and blocked itself up against the galaxy’s white spray. I saw the nine lights flickering. Still no Beardsley. The presence of these lights had been a comfort, I realised, like a border of the human world. As long as they stayed where they were – distant and static – I was all right. But now they just seemed to make the presence of real company all the more terrifying. I gave a fresh shudder when I thought of her still behind the door.
I let the curtain drop and rested my head against the frame.
Then, from out in the stairwell, I heard footsteps moving away. I walked to the door, looked out and saw her creeping between the other flats. She knocked on one, waited with her hands clasped, and moved to the next. I wondered how long it would be before she realised.
I only go through open doors. That’s my rule. I keep the locked ones shut.
About half of Seton Bayley Tower cleared out in the first few days of the exodus. By then the streets were crammed with cars, buses wedged across junctions and families trudging south carrying too many things and dragging their squealing kids behind them. When we got wind of the road attacks and others in the north, most just left their cars and walked.
I do not know how far they got. Every day it seemed there was something else – another little smoke plume on the horizon or a whisper of an incident abroad. I saw a plane take a dive once; a passenger jet’s engine exploded over The Rye as it was making its descent into Heathrow. I watched it bank into the black smoke, screaming and sliding away from the sky like butter melting off an invisible pan before disappearing north. A distant boom sounded and the resulting smoke lasted two days.
Then there was the conflict, of course, the lacklustre tanks and the proud Purples and all that. More civilians left or were taken during that week, and many more in the wake of it.
After that I lost track of things. But I knew I was never leaving.
Some of my neighbours locked their doors, either through habit or design, but most left them banging in the wind. One day I woke up to the sound of a fly buzzing in the window and nothing else. I listened to it for a while, marvelling at the silence in which it played, then got up and wandered out. To my surprise, the whole block was empty, and it wasn’t long after that the rest of the streets went the same way. Me and Lineker – we were on our own.
I enjoyed the peace. I enjoyed the space. There was more room to move around in and nobody to get in the way, no pavements I could not move on, no cars to watch out for, no angry faces behind windows. And the quiet let my thoughts move around too. Modern life is a queer thing. All that stuff happening out there outside your head; all that progress, all that change – you think you can blot it out and close the door but it seeps in. The buzzing, the bubbling, the noise of it all gets caught in your head too, and soon you don’t realise that you’ve been walking around with a head like a wasp’s nest.
But then it settles. When everyone goes, your thoughts go too, and they leave you with something else entirely. Your head opens up and empties out, leaving a shell of new shapes and opportunities. Just like London did.
But it does have its downsides, this space in your head. After a little while, all those other thoughts – those ones that had been keeping quiet in all that noise – they come crawling out of the woodwork again. And when mine did, I knew I had to turn my mind to something new.
I waited a few weeks to see if anyone came back. Even then it felt unusual. The silence made what I was doing seem worse, as if the building itself was looking down on me with judging eyes glaring from every corner. I prowled the silent stairs, feeling like a child in a room he should not be in.
My first was number 517: fifth floor, seventeenth flat. The door was chipped and, when I gave it a push, something rustled. Squeezing my way inside, I saw a black bin bag squashed between the door and the wall, with papers and bottles spilling from it. There were others like it about the place, tied or open like this one, and the floor was strewn with rubbish. A child’s doodles decorated the wall above a skirting board – faces, flowers and a hopeful sun scrawled in biro on the chipped paint. Beneath it, torn comics and plastic toys from fast-food meals mingled with fag butts and bottle tops, like a nursery scrapyard.
Through a door was an unmade bed with a single boot sitting on its pillow.
‘Hello?’ I called. Perhaps that sounds foolish but you would have done it too. There was no reply, of course, so I turned my attention to the kitchen. Some of the drawers were open and one was hanging from its runners with the cutlery falling out, but the cupboards and fridge were closed. My boots crunched on broken glass and dirt.
I remember all this detail only because it was my first. I had never been someone that took things from other people, not because I thought it was wrong or anything; I had nothing against it, in its right place, and I had once known people who made a living from it, the ones who walked the streets nightly in July to scope out the empty houses checking the timings of the lights and the strength of the fences and which ones had dogs. No, I had no moral objections to burglary, it was just that the idea of poking around the lives of other people made me distinctly uncomfortable.
So the last time I had done anything like this I had been nine. I had watched as my friend Jason, with his shock of yellow hair and gawky grin, broke into the upstairs of a furniture warehouse and poked his head out brandishing a drill. I had run off when I heard his dad approaching from his block, just left him there and hid behind the bins, from where I watched him being dragged away by his ear, beaten as he went.
Jason is in prison now, so I believe. Or at least, he was.
In that first flat I found a jar of pasta sauce, half a pot of marmalade, some ginger nut biscuits (had been hoping for garibaldi’s) and some concentrated apple juice. I left them there – there was no need to take anything yet since the supermarkets were still reasonably well stocked – but I wrote down what I had found. I do not know why, something just told me to, so I got out a little notebook and scribbled it all in, dated and marked with the flat number. The next day I searched the other flats on my floor, and then I started on the rest. Soon, I had catalogued the entire block and was doing the same with the others on the estate. The gaps in my map filled with each day, and with eve
ry new door I opened the reality of my solitude became more apparent. Everyone was gone.
I stood frozen to the spot, listening to her as she made her way down the corridor and imagining her feeling along the walls between the doors. She knocked on doors and I counted each one, matching them against each empty flat until she stopped. There was a moment of silence before the familiar squeak of the door to the stairwell. It thumped back into the frame and slow, uncertain footsteps disappeared down to the floor below.
Brave, I thought.
About half an hour later as I lay in bed, shivering in the cold, the stairwell door squeaked again and the slow shuffle of her footsteps returned. She knocked on my door and I squeezed my eyes shut, willing her to go away, which she eventually did. The last I heard of her was a slide and a thump as she found her corner, followed by distant, fractured sobs.
Since my catalogue of the flats first began, three weeks after the exodus, I have slept like a baby, every night.
But I will not sleep a wink tonight. Not with the girl outside.
Shit Bit
LINEKER
This is not a good bit. This is, quite frankly, a shit bit. The shittiest shit bit I can remember for ages. In fact, the last time there was a bit as shitty as this shitty bit, I was a pup. And that’s saying something.
I’m well pissed off.
I love Reg, you know I do. I love him like nothing in the world. I would walk this great green earth of his, twice round backwards on my hind legs balancing a steak on my nose if I knew it meant a cuddle with that man. I trust him to do the right thing, and sometimes that means putting up with a fair bit of unusual behaviour. Like all that fucking about he does before we leave the flat. What is that? My nose is at the door as soon as I hear the jingle of my lead, but this one, he’s back and forwards, picking things up, putting them down again, opening and closing drawers, putting on his jacket, saying things to himself, dropping keys. Very odd indeed, but I know he has to do it all for some reason. I trust the mysterious ways in which he moves.
The Last Dog on Earth Page 7
