by Rhys Thomas
Joseph had almost stopped by now. The wipers squeaked across the windscreen.
‘Look at that,’ said Miriam, pointing at the third car.
In front of them, a green Ford pulled over. Miriam sensed something grow inside her. She didn’t know what it was but she could feel it very strongly. It wasn’t a vague tingling; this sense was strong and definite, fact-like. It was warning her. She looked across to Joseph and wondered if he could feel it too but his eyes stared steadily ahead. She said nothing to him.
The line of traffic moved slowly on. Miriam noticed a flash of colour in the road. A man had run from the green Ford out into the road, through a gap in the traffic. He was wearing a bright red rain jacket and he held his hands aloft: let me get past.
At last Joseph had to stop. The man in the red jacket ran to the stationary car in the fast lane and looked inside. Then he stood up and looked around, as if searching for someone. He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head to shield himself from the driving rain and ran further along the road, into the headlights of the stationary car.
Joseph pulled forward a few more yards, keeping as close to the vehicle in front as he could. As they crawled forward Miriam saw what it was that the man was running towards. There in the road, sitting Buddha-like on the asphalt, was a person. The rain was so thick that Miriam couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
‘Oh my God,’ she said.
She wound down the window and leaned her head out.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Joseph yelled. ‘Wind the window up.’
Miriam’s body clammed. She turned her head to him.
‘Wind it up,’ he said again, angrily.
Old memories tumbled out and she was looking at the Joseph she remembered. She wanted to argue with him but knew what it would bring. Her reluctant hand, trembling, reached for the window handle and rolled it up and she said nothing.
The person sitting in the road was a woman. She had long hair and it was slicked to her head. Rainwater dribbled off her nose like a waterfall. The man in the red coat knelt at her side and put his arm on her back but when she felt his touch, the woman fell to her side and rolled away into the central reservation.
‘We can’t take any risks,’ said Joseph, trying to modulate his voice.
‘I just wanted to see if she was OK.’
Miriam could feel her whole chest beginning to shake, her nerves gossamer thin. She felt in some way linked, through Henry,to the woman in the road. The woman gathered around her the same dense gravity, a funnel of spinning space that collected atmosphere into her. She was looking at Henry and Joseph would not let her help.
‘We should stop.’ The rattling of the engine and the rain against the steelwork of the car filled the silence. ‘Joseph?’
‘And do what? Are you a doctor? No. So what are you going to do?’ The pitch of his voice changed. ‘Say a prayer?’
Her anger grew quickly, like a flame, fanned by the years of memory that had opened up and snapped away. Her body tautened.
‘Why do you always have to bring it up?’
She looked out of the window at the rain. Why couldn’t he just leave her alone?
His fingers moved off the wheel and stretched, then curled back around.
‘Look, Miri,’ he sighed, ‘I want to help you, I want to make sure you’re safe. But you have to listen to me, OK? I’m sure whatever this thing is will go away, but until then you have to understand that we just need to get through it. We can’t take stupid risks, or waste time stopping on motorways for strangers. That woman in the road wouldn’t have stopped for you.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Yes, I do. People aren’t all like you. They don’t help each other. Not when it comes down to it.’
‘The other man stopped.’
Joseph slammed his hand on the steering wheel.
‘Well, I’m not the other man,’ he snapped, his voice frayed. ‘I will never be the other man. This is serious, Miriam. Whatever it is, it killed Henry and it’s killing lots of other people too. It isn’t a game. We have to look after ourselves. That’s what everyone else is going to do. We can’t just go helping people out, all right?’
She knew better than to argue with him when he became intense like this. She looked in the wing mirror at the man in the red coat and the woman lying in the central reservation. She pictured Henry in bed that morning, the life gone out of his eyes. She pictured the man she had found on the bench at the cliff top. Her eyes started to sting again. She did not want to cry in front of Joseph.
The sound of a phone sang out into the car. Miriam felt a tear roll over her cheek. She clicked to answer.
‘Sophia?’ At the other end of the line she thought she could hear something that sounded like a hiss. ‘Hello?’ she said again.
She wiped her nose.
And then there was a voice speaking into the mouthpiece, but it did not belong to her friend. She didn’t recognize the voice.
‘There were seven colours before,’ it said. ‘That was the promise.’
‘Daniel?’ she said, her skin prickling.
She turned to Joseph, who stared unerringly ahead.
‘No colours any more though,’ said the voice. ‘The mercy took them, and turned them to white.’
Henry’s father opened the door to the airing cupboard. He pulled on the light switch he had rigged up when the kids were young, and squinted at the shelves. On the top shelf were the games he had played with his boys. He reached up and felt his skeleton expand and creak. Surely the shelf hadn’t been this high before. He took down an old box and blew the thick covering of dust away. Extinguishing the light he sensed a great wave of loss for his son. He paused for a moment and steadied himself. Dizziness swirled into his head and he reached out his hand for the doorframe. The wood was warm to the touch. He remembered the day he had put up the shelves. Henry hadn’t even been born then. He was still four years away. Joseph had helped hold the tools and the perspex box in which their grandfather kept his nails, screws and tacks.
Regaining himself, he walked along the narrow landing to the top of the stairs and went down, slowly, to the kitchen. The children were waiting for him at the table.
‘OK,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘who knows how to play Snakes and Ladders?’
They looked at him blankly.
‘Then all will be revealed,’ he proclaimed.
The children sat up warily and leaned forward, Mary bringing her legs up under her body to kneel on her chair. Henry’s father noticed the delight on her face when she laid her eyes on the colourful, smiling snakes.
‘What’s your favourite colour, Mary?’
‘Uum,’ she said, drawing the word out, ‘purple!’
Henry’s father peered into the box. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’ He withdrew a purple counter and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You’re purple.
‘And what about you, Edward?’
Edward didn’t answer.
‘Edward?’
‘Red,’ he answered, with reluctance.
‘Red it is.’ He fished for the red counter.
‘Granddad,’ said Edward. ‘Is Dad really dead?’
Henry’s father stopped.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Has he gone to heaven?’ asked Mary.
‘Yes. Good people go to heaven, don’t they?’
Mary nodded slowly. Her whole upper body moved when she nodded.
‘Is he going to come back?’ she said.
Henry’s father sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table.
‘He’s not going to come back.’ The children stared at him. ‘I know you won’t understand this, but you should not be frightened of dying. Everybody dies, but that’s not such a bad thing. All you’re doing is returning a favour, really. The world does you a pretty big favour when it lets you be born and become a person. Just imagine: you could be born a termite and get gobbled up by a big old anteater, but
you’re not. So if you’re going to be born, then you have to die at the end. That’s the deal.’ He smiled. ‘And it’s a pretty good deal. Dying is just the same as being born, but the other way around. You come in and then you collect up all of these wonderful memories and have fun times, and then you go out again.’
He smiled to his grandchildren, though he did not know if he was trying to console them for the loss of their father, or prepare them for what seemed to be a likely future.
‘I’m not scared,’ he said. ‘So you shouldn’t be either. It’s a natural thing. It’s no different from leaves falling off trees in the autumn. Do you understand?’
Mary shook her head without hesitation. ‘No,’ she said categorically.
London was different. The buildings were taller, greyer. The city with all its walls and height assumed a new, stark menace. Anything could be around the corner. The newly realized fear of the unknown made the place cold and ominous.
The rain had stopped. The orange from the street lamps reflected in the wet roads. There were few people on the streets. The grand townhouses in this part of London were set back from the road.
Joseph pulled the Peugeot to a stop and Miriam unclipped her seatbelt.
‘Are you coming?’
‘I’ll wait here.’
She pushed open the heavy iron gate and walked towards the house. The gravel on the path crackled beneath her. The porch was dark. There were no lights on, either upstairs or down. Six low concrete steps led up to the porch and as Miriam reached the first, she saw the front door hanging ajar. With caution, she went into the darkness.
‘Hello?’
The hall was bathed in an eerie orange light from outside. As quietly as she could, Miriam moved down the stretch of woodblock floor to the doorway on the left, which led to the living room. Her shadow stretched before her, grey and indistinct. The door was shut. The metal of the handle was cold on her skin.
She flicked the light switch and her eyes were instinctively drawn to the office chair in front of the far window, out of place in the elegant décor of the living room. Sophia’s husband was sitting in the chair, facing away from her, staring out of the window.
‘Daniel?’
He didn’t move. Her instant reaction was that he was dead.
A messy red line in the cream-coloured carpet led from Daniel’s chair to the centre of the room, out of sight behind the sofa. Despite her fear she crossed the room quickly. The red line led to Sophia’s body. She was covered in blood; an android outline, toes pointed at the ceiling, the idea of a human.
Miriam screamed and covered her mouth, her whole body shaking. She ran to her friend and fell to her knees. The blood was still warm, Sophia’s long, black hair slick with it. It was coming from her chest. There were so many rips in her shirt where she had been stabbed.
‘No, no, no.’
The image of Sophia’s face hung frozen in a shining red mask. Miriam’s hands trembled as she tried to wipe the blood clear but whenever the pink of flesh appeared it was quickly enveloped again in the red sheen. Three stab marks, two in the right cheek, one in the left, were like underground springs recycling blood on to Sophia’s face.
She dropped the body in an instant slam of horror. Scrabbling backwards, she gagged for breath and brought her hands to her mouth. The taste of Sophia’s blood was acrid and she spat on to the floor.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw a movement. Rigid with metallic shock she moved her head round. Daniel was looking at her. His face had appeared from behind the office chair. For a moment they stared at each other. His eyes were dead. There was no expression on his face. He regarded Miriam for a long time and then, slowly, turned back and his head disappeared behind the chair once more.
Miriam snatched for air. There was a loud bang from the hallway and then a pair of legs appeared in front of her. A set of arms pulled her to her feet. She closed her eyes.
‘Come on,’ said Joseph’s voice. ‘We have to go.’
He bundled Miriam into the car and sat alongside her. She was trembling violently. Her shaking hands clutched her face. He started the engine and pulled out into the street. The car raced down the quiet road and out into the dark streets of London. A mist had started to settle over the city. The street lamps were visible now only as indistinct orbs of orange. Joseph threw the fog-lights switch.
They travelled along the edge of the river. There was more traffic here. It was reassuring to Joseph to see this version of normality. London was still alive. They crossed the water. A single riverboat sailed towards them, its lights shining through the dark space and the fog. He checked his phone. No calls, no messages. There was a quiet patch of road and he pulled over. Across the river the Houses of Parliament hummed ochre, their reflection just a golden shimmer on the water. Joseph called the police and passed on Sophia’s address. He climbed out of his car, not wanting Miriam to hear him speaking, and the freezing air made him shiver.
‘Is there anything I need to know? Do you know what’s happening?’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the woman at the other end. ‘Just follow the instructions on the television and online. That’s all you can do.’
He looked down the street and took a deep breath. He couldn’t see far in either direction.
When he reached his apartment building the brightness of the halogen lights in the underground car park gave the world a new, eerie, luminescence. He felt afraid suddenly. Moving quietly around to the other side of the car, he checked that nobody else was in there with him. He thought he could feel eyes on him.
‘Miri,’ he said, opening her door.
Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was resting on the dashboard and she was not moving. Joseph stepped away from her instinctively. Tiny sparks shot up his arms and laterally across his chest. He waited for a moment. He turned away and took a breath of air from behind him.
‘Miriam?’ he said again.
She opened her eyes and looked at him.
‘OK,’ she said, and climbed out of the car. ‘I’m OK.’
He put Miriam to bed and went into the living room. Pele was curled up in his basket in front of the French windows. The flat was small: a porch area, a bedroom, a bathroom and the living room. The kitchenette was just an L-shaped line of cabinets with a stove in the back corner. He switched on the radio and made up the sofa bed.
The news reported an event taking place in Russia. The entire country had gone silent, all lines of communication cut. No messages had been received, no messages had been sent. The whole country had closed. Joseph smiled. This was ridiculous.
He collected up the mess that had accumulated in the little room. He took the dishes to the sink and washed them. He cleared all the rubbish into the bin and took it to the refuse collection area at the back of the building, still ensuring that he separated out the paper for the recycle bin. He took some sheets from the laundry cupboard and laid them over the sofa bed. Papers from work were everywhere. He bundled them together and took them over to the table in the corner of the room.
Over by the doorway to the porch was a small display shelf. On it was a framed photograph of him and Henry. He lifted it up and looked at it. It was from a fishing trip they had taken years ago. They both looked like young men and there was a great expanse of blue sky behind them. Joseph wished he had spoken to Henry again, just one last time. The weight of everything that had been left unsaid, the stuff he had promised he would say one day when he got the chance, sat heavily on his body.
He remembered the day well. They had bought some crab lines and dangled them into the still, oily waters of the harbour and collected the crabs in a bucket. At sunset they had climbed down the steps to the water’s edge and dropped them in and watched their red bodies glimmer, fade and disappear into the darkness.
He placed the photograph back on the shelf and tried to stifle the immensity of regret. He wondered how it was possible for so strong a relationship to have become what it did.
He
looked around the flat again, went over to the French windows and drew the curtains across. Pele wheezed in his sleep.
Next, Joseph went to the store cupboard in the porch. There were piles of blankets and clothes. He found the pair of old running shoes he was looking for and took them into the living room. They had belonged to one of his old girlfriends and he thought that Miriam should have them because her own shoes were woefully impractical for what he thought might just be the end of the world. He placed the shoes down over by the French windows and climbed into bed where he cursed himself for shouting at Miriam the way he had and then fell asleep, listening to the radio, listening to the news that the government had released an official statement saying that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had passed away quietly in his sleep.
Miriam lifted open her eyes and stared at a ceiling she did not recognize. The sound that had taken her from sleep came back, a low rumble somewhere on the horizon, unsettling and sustained. Soon it split in two, a taut, tense high end peeling away and clashing discordantly against the low rumble; twin sounds raking over the city. The noise was growing and assuming a machine-like form.
She went through to the living room where Joseph lay asleep. A set of French windows led out on to a small metal balcony. Miriam opened the door and a freezing wind swept into the room. With it came the sound, louder now, furious on the wind. Quickly, she slid through the door and closed it gently behind her.
A black ribbon of canal ran behind Joseph’s apartment block, hardly visible through the fog. The noise filled the whole sky. It was everywhere now. Miriam opened her eyes. She was afraid but determined to remain where she was. A wall of resolve was building within her.
‘I’m not moving,’ she said to the sound.
It screamed at her, a fury without source.
And then two white lights appeared in the fog. They moved together across the sky, towards her. She imagined to what machine they might belong. Was an aircraft really about to crash into London? The sound filled her head: a dreadful, raging turbulence.
