And you know what? As the sun crept over the water I looked up at those crumbling towers and wondered at how bleak they seemed in comparison to my life. I wanted to be far from them, back home in the safety of my chair and looking out, not up. They could keep their shit-stained rafters; I was a dog, after all, not a bird.
The scent was strong now, almost eye-watering. Soon I would find him, we would be reunited, and all we would have to accomplish was our journey home.
I saw them from a brickwork jaw jutting from the bank that had once been a bridge. The three figures were dim in the mist, but unmistakeable. His slight stoop, his cautious movements, I could even tell what he was thinking by the shape of his profile. Reg.
I ran towards him, filled with love.
They were on a barge moored to a jetty, talking in whispers, arranging coats and bags in the narrow space below the hatch. I was still some way off when I saw them stop. I stopped too, because I was hit by the most almighty smell from Reg’s pores, like nothing I’d ever smelled from him before. I almost fell to my belly. What was this? The blood tang of hope, the aching wet wood of despair and relief’s seaweed all gushing out of him at once, spiralling into something I knew even he couldn’t put into words. He wiped a tear from his eye and placed a shaking hand upon the girl’s shoulder. Then he turned and climbed the ladder back up to the jetty.
I continued on, and as I drew near I got a similar scent from the girl, only it was quivering and less developed, like a raw jelly trembling in her heart.
The woman pushed away with the pole and the barge swung silently out onto the water. The girl stood with her hands on the stern, looking back at Reg like some radiant angel sent to watch over him. She gave him a slow wave that didn’t stop, and Reg waved back with a smile that tore at my heart. I watched him, swirling with wonder and pride and sadness, and his smells began to change yet again. All those voles of fear began to scatter, freed at last and flowing over his clifftops like lemmings. Whatever mysteries were inside of him were shifting now, making room for other things, good things.
I had to be near him, so I picked up the pace.
The boat had almost disappeared into the mist when he dropped his hand. It was time to leave. I barked and he turned in surprise.
‘Lineker?’ he said, a beautiful beam spreading across his face like a sunrise. ‘Lineker, you found me!’
He held out his arms and I broke into a gallop.
Home. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, not after what we’d been through to get here, but we’d make it somehow. We had each other, and at least we weren’t going north.
North.
Hang on, I thought, my eyes drifting to the barge. We’re not going north, but are they?
My thoughts began to fuzz around the edges. I got a sense of something and looked back at Reg. He was no longer opening his arms but standing upright, staring out at the water. And those voles of his … they weren’t falling any more. They were climbing back up.
My ears twitched, paws jolted.
Focus.
I was close now, almost there.
Reg was no longer smiling. His eyes and mouth were wide open. Fear was returning to him in droves. I followed his line of sight and saw what he saw – a halo of sickly green light hanging over the boat. The woman looked up and pulled the girl to her waist with her free hand.
Reg was calling to them – Come back! – but the woman was frozen, head shaking, still scanning the sky above them. From out of the mist came two birds, buzzing like enormous bees. They hovered there, two cameras tilting down at the boat. Not birds, not bees – drones.
My hackles were up, my mouth was full of froth, my senses were on fire. In a split second I had lurched across the full spectrum of my physiology, from one extreme to another. Green to red. Danger.
A voice crackled from the opposite shore.
‘Continue to the north bank. State your names and identification numbers.’
The woman shook her head and pulled the girl close. Reg was running up and down the jetty, hands to his head. I was almost upon him, now riding the thermals of his panic as well as my own.
‘Names and identification numbers,’ insisted the voice. On the north bank stood a line of purple figures, two trucks on either side.
Reg seemed to come to a decision and stopped, looking down beneath the jetty. Tied to it was a small, square raft. He turned to me, eyes wild. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Lineker, stay.’
I came to a halt. Just a few strides separated us.
Stay? Are you fucking serious?
He clambered down the ladder and untethered the raft, shaking as he uncoiled the rope.
Stay? What the fuck?
Then he knelt down and paddled away from the shore. Leaving.
‘Stay!’ he called up to me, voice as high as a warbling nightingale. ‘Good boy.’
Good boy, is it? I’ll show you good fucking boy, you piece of … STAY?
No fucking way, sunshine, not this time. I’m coming with.
I scampered up and down the jetty, snapping and snarling at the water, muscles coiled, ready to spring. My senses were on full alert now, overload, information from all angles buffering and bouncing around my brain with a rotating red alarm screaming JUMP!
On the other bank the monotone repeated its demands.
On the boat, the woman crouched on the deck with the child in the protective cocoon of her arms.
In the air, the drones hovered lower, closing in.
On the raft, Reg paddled, almost at the boat.
And on my side of the water some trucks had pulled up.
People were standing next to it. Purples.
And out of the passenger side came …
JUMP!
I jumped. And for a second or so I swooped through the air, and I thought, So this is what it feels like to fly, just like those beautiful birds. Except, of course, for the fact that … no wings …
I landed with a graceless plop and the cold water hit me like a slab of iron. I thought I was dead for a second, could feel the thoughts splinter and my eyeballs freeze. My muscles hardened to stone and I felt myself sink, down, down, soon be silt on the riverbed, into the mud, back to The Howl, back to … No, no, you’re a dog, Lineker, you can swim, for fuck’s sake! My paw twitched and the other one replied, harder. Soon they were twitching together. My back legs joined in, clawing the water beneath me, until finally my nose broke the putrid surface and I was out, spluttering, looking wildly about for signs of Reg.
I saw him. He’d reached the boat. If I could just get there with him, maybe …
But the drones were upon them, and above them a larger bird had appeared. A dark purple helicopter, ladder extended, and a uniformed meat monkey running down towards them, gun swinging.
If I could just … just … my legs slowed. Whatever fumes of energy they had found were now nothing but black smoke. I had nothing left. Nothing. I drifted down, just catching sight of Reg being lifted from the water, and the woman and the girl kicking and screaming with him, up into the sky.
And I drifted down, dragged by those strange tides again, thinking, This time, this time I’m going, I’m definitely going.
Something yanked my collar and the river fell beneath me. I hung there from that hook, limp and dazed, watching the grey world spin below until I was deposited upon the concrete like a wet fish. I lay there on my belly, shivering and dripping with the sound of Reg’s cries echoing somewhere behind me. And with my last dribble of energy, with all my lines blurred beyond recognition, I opened my eyes and looked up. And I saw Her.
PART 3
Children
THREE MONTHS LATER
REGINALD
A jab in my ribs. Not hard, just enough to wake me. I opened my eyes and, as I did every morning, saw Aisha. In one hand she held a bottle of water, and in the other a crust of bread, which she held out for me, saying nothing. She had stopped talking again, and those bewildering words she had spoken in Charlie’s barge seemed like th
ey had never happened now. She was within her barricades once more, and I do not blame her.
I sat up on our mattress – a festering, springless slab filled with unimaginable human residue – and took a breath of heavy air. Charlie was already awake and cleaning her face with the hem of her outermost skirt. Aisha shoved my breakfast impatiently towards me and I took it, leaving her to continue on her way. She had business to attend to.
Children – they are not the flimsy waifs we imagine them to be. While us adults sat in that place, fretting, pacing the walls, making useless speculations and half-baked plans, the children set to work in silence. They did not cry for toys or television or books or entertainment. Instead they did what they had to in order to survive – which was to find something to occupy their time.
Our nearest neighbours, by which I mean the people on the mattress next to Charlie, Aisha and me, were a Nigerian man named David and his son, a quiet boy of six named Clifford. Clifford collected rocks. Chunks of masonry mostly, but stones and pebbles from the yard too. He kept them in neat piles, ordered and reordered countless times by size, shape, pigment and a dozen other categorisations he alone knew in those depths of his mind to which he retreated during the waking hours. We took it upon ourselves to help him, and it was always a delight when one of us found a new treasure for his collection. The cherry-shaped obsidian pebble with grey contours that I had presented to him had kept him smiling for hours.
Other children carved endless patterns and imaginary animals into the soft, crumbling brickwork, or played elaborate games with plastic bottles and the paper bags in which our bread arrived.
Aisha’s distraction – the ongoing duty she took upon herself to fulfil every day, without fail – was to ensure the even distribution of rations. Bread, water, porridge, that foul and feeble fluid that passed for soup; it was all to be shared out equally.
I had soon come to realise that the thing Aisha cared about most was care itself. The weak were not to be treated unfairly. No one was to be left behind – a rule of which I was reminded every night by the soft, cruel calls of Lineker’s name in her sleep.
Perhaps she had seen so little care that it seemed a treasure in itself; some precious commodity the world lacked, but of which she discovered in herself an unlimited store. If it was a product of what she had been through – and her experience still remained a mystery – it could easily have had an opposite effect, had she been made of different stuff. I am sure that history has no end of examples of how mistreatment causes equal amounts apathy as empathy. Such times show us our mettle, I suppose, and Aisha’s mettle was strong; on her watch, nobody would go hungry.
At least, no one in our small corner behind the fallen pillar. For there were thousands more beyond.
In near darkness we huddled in warrens of rubble spilling from walls that had once withstood the ravages of three centuries. Some of the brickwork shone with traces of gold trim, and you could still make out the splintered chessboard of the floor, but otherwise all was a gloomy brown covered in dust and mould.
We kept our voices low on account of the guards, who wandered the great hall constantly. Our whispers carried up into the heavens – the tourist gallery that now provided a lookout – where they met wet mist and bleary sunlight straining through the gash in the gilded dome.
At night they dangled gas lamps from the gallery, with flames so dim they barely lit an inch of space around them. We slept beneath a haze of orange spots, hissing like the breaths of dying angels, and the flicker of makeshift candles scraped from ancient wax drippings, and lit secretly from the guards’ flicked cigarettes.
St Paul’s Cathedral, though now in ruins, had survived the bombs.
Charlie, Aisha and I had found a space in one corner of the northern aisle, which had been divided by a fallen pillar. The effect was that we were separated from the rest by a natural wall with a rough, rubble-strewn door where the pillar had split in half. We had blankets and a thin mattress like most others, although it had taken us a few days to acquire them. Others lined the walls on either side of us. There was no segregation – individuals, couples and families of all ages, colours and accents claimed their own space in the makeshift prison. Those of us who had been there long enough knew not to take more than our fair share, not to cause a scene, and not to complain about anything to the guards.
Duncan, on the other hand, had only just arrived.
‘Why am I here?’
He was in his forties and wore a suit that had probably been expensive once, but was now creased and baggy. He paced a short section of broken wall, running his hand through his flop of crow-black hair.
‘Anyone? Can anyone tell me why the hell I’m in here? Because I just don’t get it.’ He paused at the end of a section of pillar and gave a trembling huff. Then he resumed his urgent pacing. ‘I’m not black, I’m not Indian, I’m not Muslim. I was born in Wiltshire, went to fucking Oxford …’
David cupped his hands over his son’s ears at our new guest’s language. At this, Duncan rolled his eyes and scuffed the concrete with his once-gleaming brogues.
‘I’m not gay, I’m not a commie, I read the Financial Times, I even pay my taxes, for Christ’s sake! At least I did when there were taxes to pay.’ He smacked a palm against the wall. ‘I’ve never claimed benefits. I had an excellent job …’ He scanned the walls. ‘One which I managed to keep through all this, I might add.’ He nodded, jabbing a finger at us all. ‘Oh yes, which is more than I could probably say for all of you, eh? Isn’t it? I kept my fucking job!’
‘Please,’ David said to Duncan. ‘Keep your language civil for the benefit of our children.’
‘Pffft, sorry,’ spat Duncan. He kicked the ground like a moping teenager. ‘But I did. Three years I spent trying to keep that bank going; no mean feat when there’s no electricity or internet.’
He gazed dreamily away.
‘There was a time when I watched seven-figure deals coming in before I was halfway down my first latte. And I’ve just spent the last six months transferring a database onto fucking graph paper using car batteries and a dot matrix printer. Not exactly the life of a City boy, is it? But I did it, I put my fucking oar in, I did my fucking bit.’
‘Sir, please,’ David insisted, getting to his feet.
‘Oh, fuck off!’ said Duncan, spittle flying over his shoulder.
David stood as tall as his five foot seven inch frame would allow. ‘This is not making anything easier on us,’ he said. ‘And if you won’t adjust your behaviour for the children, then do it for your own safety, I implore you. The guards do not like—’
‘My behaviour?’ Duncan turned, hands on hips. ‘I was on my third data run between Manchester and London when they picked me up. I had all my credentials ready as always, ID, passport, company visa, right to travel, everything and nothing to hide. What do I get? A sack over the fucking head and no explanation. Nothing. So, excuse me if my behaviour is a little irate, but I do so very much want to know: why the fuck am I here?’ He opened his arms. ‘Why are any of us here?’ he babbled, his voice jumping an octave.
‘Hey,’ said a girl sitting on her own who I had not heard speak before. She was in her early twenties and wore tight black jeans with a grey vest and a red, checked shirt. Dark roots showed in her straggly bleached hair. Her accent was from somewhere across the Atlantic. ‘Will you keep your voice down?’
‘Shut up,’ said Duncan, without taking his eyes off David. He took a step towards him. ‘You. At least you know why you’re here. What are you, West Indian, Jamaican or something?’
‘My family was from Nigeria,’ David replied.
‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘Foreigner, probably had one of those phone shops, or –’ he gave a hideous grin ‘– what, were you … were you one of those idiots who sent me fake emails telling me I’d won a fucking yacht?’ He looked around, delighted with himself, but his grin shrivelled in the silence.
‘He’s a British citizen,’ said the girl. �
�And he was an IT support technician.’
‘Oh yeah? And how would you know?’
‘Because I listen to people.’ She looked at him coolly, raising one black eyebrow. ‘You ever try that, fuck-nugget?’
Duncan stormed towards her but found David in his way. I went to stand too but my bad knee, having not moved for some time, shot through with pain.
The corners of Duncan’s mouth pulled down. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’
Duncan straightened his suit and turned to the girl. ‘What about you?’ he said, unable to control the tremble in his voice. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Dana.’
‘Canadian?’
‘Full marks,’ she replied, unimpressed.
Duncan raised his chin. ‘I used to go to Vancouver with work every other month,’ he said. ‘I know the accent. What were you, a student? Activist, is that it?’
‘I am a nurse. And yeah, I was an activist. So what?’
‘Well that explains you.’ He bit his nail and scanned the dark walls.
‘Foreigners, benefit cheats, layabouts, lefties and Arabs …’
There was a scuffle of boots and half the room was on its feet, either holding him against the wall or trying to prevent others from doing so. Charlie and I shared a look and turned from the argument. We had no desire to get caught up in a quarrel that would draw attention; we had only one priority, and she was currently feeding mouldy bread to a four-year-old girl.
I have no idea how I made it to Charlie’s barge. When I look back it feels like a dream; untying that raft and paddling across the hellish water. All I remember after reaching the boat’s stern is the deafening whack and slice of helicopter blades and a blinding light as I was dragged from the raft. Then I felt sackcloth pulled tight around my face. Lineker, I thought. Not again. Then everything went dark.
When I woke I was still in the sack and bound by the wrists, lying in the back of a truck. I could hear Aisha’s breaths nearby.
The Last Dog on Earth Page 24
