White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  “Well,” said Peter, but he did not continue.

  They worked in silence for a while, Doug thinking around the subject of death, Peter perhaps doing the same. Everything Doug did now was tainted with the promise of their own demise: this food would not be fully digested when the time came; he may never sleep again, it was a waste of time … so no more dreams. Gemma would not grow up to go to university, marry, bear her own children …

  “It’s just so unfair!” he shouted, throwing the knife at the flagstone floor. He regretted it instantly, felt a cool hand of shame tickle at his scalp. He had not seen this man for ten years, and here he was trying his best to destroy his kitchen.

  And there’s another irony, he thought. In days … hours … this kitchen won’t be here.

  Peter glanced at him but said nothing. He continued peeling potatoes.

  Doug wondered whether the old nutcase was as far gone as he led to believe. “Why all the lights? And the animals on the trees? And the gargoyles?”

  Peter shook his hands dry and transferred the vegetables into a huge pan of boiling water. “In reverse order: the gargoyles to keep people away from the house; the animals on the trees to keep trespassers from my land; the lights so that people can see what I’ve done. It took a long time. Why have it all hidden half the time?”

  Doug smiled at the simple logic of it. “But why keep people from the house?”

  The old man shrugged. “Don’t like people, mostly.”

  There was a clatter of feet from the hallway and Gemma and Lucy-Anne hurried in. They both had wet hair, loose-fitting clothes that Peter had found in some mysteriously well-appointed wardrobe and rosy complexions that made Doug’s heart ache.

  “Your turn,” Peter said.

  “Huh?”

  “Shower. Change. Forgive my bluntness, but you smell.”

  “Daddy smells, Daddy smells!”

  He relented, and after giving his wife and daughter a kiss — a hard hug for Gemma, a long, lingering kiss for Lucy-Anne — he made his way up the curving staircase to their bedrooms.

  There were towels on the bed, a basket of fruit on the dressing table, a bottle of red wine uncorked and breathing beside the bed, two glasses, and a door between theirs and Gemma’s bedrooms. Thought I might see some of my folk over the next day or two, the mad old fool had said. And though he had claimed to hate people, Doug could see that this was what Peter had wanted more than anything else.

  After a hearty meal of steak, fried potatoes, vegetables and great, thick chunks of garlic butter-soaked bread, the four of them made their way into Peter’s living room and sat down with a drink. Gemma went to sleep almost immediately, nestled against Peter’s arm, and the three adults — though tired — sat talking until the sun set fire to the day outside.

  There was a strange atmosphere between them, a feeling that they had known each other forever and that there was not a chasm of ten years between this and their last meeting. Lucy-Anne and Peter seemed especially comfortable, finding it unnecessary to resort to reliving old times or talking about absent — or dead — family members to get by. Instead their talk was of Gemma, what she had done in her short life to date, what she wanted to do. Her prospects.

  And for a while, Doug was happy to let this go. He half-closed his eyes, enjoying the sense of the brandy sweeping through his veins and setting his stiff muscles afire, listening to Peter and Lucy-Anne’s tempered voices. He found solace in their tone if not their words. He soon tried to tune out what they were saying — because none of it held true meaning any more — and enjoy instead the peace their voices conveyed, the sheer pleasantness of this unreal scene of family conviviality.

  But then Gemma stirred and began to mutter in her sleep.

  “Never done that before …” Lucy-Anne said idly. And she said no more.

  None of them did. There was nothing to do but listen to what the little girl was saying.

  “First birds were in the Jurassic period, two hundred and thirteen million years ago,” she mumbled into Peter’s side.

  The old man stared down at her wide-eyed, but he did not move. Moving may have disturbed her.

  “First mammals and dinosaurs in the Triassic two hundred and forty-eight million years ago, but the dinosaurs reached their peak in the Cretaceous, one hundred and forty-four million years back. First land plants in Silurian times, four hundred and thirty-eight million years ago.” She struggled slightly then, frowning, as if searching for something hidden behind whatever she had been saying. “First humans. Couple of million years ago. Pleistocene epoch.”

  She sat up and opened her eyes. “Blink of an eye.”

  “Gemma?” Doug whispered, but then she began to cry.

  “Bright girl you’ve got here, folks.”

  “Gemma? Honey?”

  Gemma’s face crumpled as sleep left her behind. Tears formed in her eyes, her nose wrinkled. “Dad,” she said. “Mum …” Then the tears came in earnest and Doug darted across the room, lifted his daughter from Peter’s side, hugged her close to him.

  “Gemma, what’s wrong babe?” Lucy-Anne said. Her voice betrayed none of Doug’s concern or confusion. Hadn’t she heard what Gemma was saying? Hadn’t it registered?

  “Got a headache,” she sniffled into Doug’s shoulder. “And I need to pee.”

  “Here.” Lucy-Anne took Gemma and carried her from the room, and seconds later the two men heard her footsteps on the bare timber risers.

  Doug was breathing heavily. Something about the last minute had scared him badly, some facet of Gemma’s sleep-talking sat all wrong with what was happening, what they were going through.

  “Well, I bought her a dinosaur book,” he said. “All kids like dinosaurs, but I’m sure … well, that was pretty detailed.”

  “Like I said, bright girl.”

  “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?” Doug said. “You, me, Lucy-Anne … Gemma.”

  “Of course,” Peter nodded. “Nothing we can do about it. But we have some time, don’t know how much but there’s some. How about we make it the best we can?” He smiled and poured Doug another drink. “Here. Been saving this for a special day.”

  “End of the world?”

  The old man surprised him by laughing out loud. “The end of the world. Hell yes, why not? Might as well enjoy it before those damn little robots get their grubby mitts on it.”

  The two men drank to that.

  “Sun’s coming up,” Doug said after a couple of minutes. “Today will be the day, I reckon.”

  “We’ll go for a walk,” Peter said suddenly. “I have a large estate, you know. A herd of deer, a lake, and a walk up into the mountains that you’d kill for. It’ll be wondrous. I’ll do a lunch for us. I bake my own bread, you’ll faint with delight when you taste it, it’s simply heavenly. And I’ll even take a few bottle of wine I’ve been—“

  “Saving for a suitable occasion?”

  Peter nodded. “Absolutely. A suitable occasion. You’ll see, we’ll have a fine day. We’ll watch the sunset from the mountains. And if it’s not the sunset we get to see … well, we’ll watch the other from up there. I imagine from what I’ve heard about it, it will be quite a sight.”

  “Reality being unmade before our eyes. All matter unstitched. Quite a sight, yes.”

  “Ah, yes.” Peter sat back in his huge chair and steepled his fingers, peering between the arches.

  Doug wondered what he saw. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “I suppose I am. Not the circumstances, mind. Just … well, having you here.”

  “I thought you didn’t like people.”

  Peter looked surprised for a moment, then lowered his eyes slightly. It was the only time Doug ever saw a hint of humility or shame in the old man. “Well, generally maybe … but it’s different. You’re my folk. And as I said, I knew some of my folk would turn up here sooner or later.”

  He raised his glass, and the new sunlight streaming through the windows set the liquid aflame.
>
  Before they left the house Peter found Doug in the downstairs bathroom, trying to contact someone on his mobile phone. They’d already tried the TV that morning … a blank screen and an endless repetition of God Save The Queen.

  “Selling your shares?” The old man smiled.

  Doug could only stare at him for a few seconds, trying to see whatever was behind the joke. “Well actually, I have a couple of friends living in Newcastle. I thought I’d … try them. See if they’re still there.”

  “Any reply?”

  “No. No, none. Line must be down, or maybe they’re working on it. Or something.”

  Peter stared back, chewing his bottom lip for a few seconds, obviously turning something over in his mind before he said it. Then he put his hands on Doug’s shoulders and drew him close, so close that their noses were almost touching. When he spoke, Doug smelled Brandy and tobacco. It was a sweet smell, lively, not at all unpleasant. It inspired a surprising nostalgia for his long-dead grandfather.

  “Doug,” the old man said, “let it go. We’ll likely be dead before sunset, all of us, and there’s absolutely nothing you, me or anyone can do about it. And the crazy thing is … it doesn’t matter.”

  “How do you figure that?” Doug said, anger rising like the sun in his chest. “Why doesn’t it matter that my wife and my daughter are about to die?”

  “Everyone is going to die. Everything is being ruined. Within a day or two, there will be nothing left of the surface of this planet, just a sea of mindless, voracious mini-robots. Nothing animal, mineral, metal. And when there’s nothing left for them to destroy, I guess they start to take each other apart, reconstruct, take apart again. Everything will be pointless, forgotten, and the only physical thing left of humanity will be a few space probes wandering the stars and a century’s worth of radio and TV transmissions winging their way into deep space. Nobody to grieve, nobody to remember, nobody to miss us. It will be like we’ve never even existed. Nothing … will … matter.”

  He squeezed Doug’s shoulders as if trying to knead the truth into his unwilling muscles.

  Doug stepped to the window, pulled the net curtain aside and stared out at the rising sun. It seemed bigger than usual, redder, and as he glanced away he retained its image on his retinas. Looking at the hillsides, the forests and the sloping moorland leading up into the mountains, the sun’s red after-image touched them all.

  It was a beautiful sunrise, maybe because it was one of the first that Doug had ever truly taken note of. It could be that dust in the air further south — dust, or those things — was catching the sunlight and spreading it across the sky, breaking up its colours and splashing an artist’s palette of light over the lowlands. But if this were the case, then it was a gift from the end of the world. There was no way he could refuse it.

  He thought about what Peter had said. He didn’t agree with him — he thought that everything mattered now more than ever, because love was still here even when hope was not — and then he turned back to the old man.

  “Well we can’t let it beat us, I suppose.”

  Peter nodded.

  Doug smiled back, pleased at the compromise he had made.

  They circled around the back of the house and headed toward the forest smothering the lower hills. Peter carried a rucksack bulging with fresh bread and choice cuts from his fridge. Lucy-Anne shouldered another bag which clinked as she walked.

  Doug carried Gemma. He sang softly, enjoying the look of contentment and happiness on her face, loving the way the corners of her mouth turned up whenever he spoke, as he had always loved it. There was nothing more wonderful in the world than seeing his daughter smile when she saw him. It told him that he was doing all the right things.

  “Alright sweetie?” he asked quietly.

  She planted a kiss on his cheek, leaned back and smiled at him. “Yes thanks, Daddy. You can let me down now, I’d like to walk.”

  “It’s a long way.”

  She shrugged, looked up into the blue sky. “I don’t care. It’s a nice day for a walk. It’s good for you, anyway.”

  He stopped and lowered Gemma to the ground. She hurried away and his vision blurred, the tears came, but he fought them back. If she saw him crying, her final day would be an unhappy one. He could never do that to her, no matter what Peter said, however sure he was that nothing mattered any more. He could never hurt his baby.

  Soon they were in the woods. Peter pointed out dozens of species of flower and heather to Gemma, who nodded attentively and smelled the blooms and prickled her fingers on the heathers, laughing. Lucy-Anne fell into step with Doug and held his hand, saying nothing. Their touch was communication enough, every slight squeeze of fingers or palm sending message of love, companionship and comfort back and forth. It made him happy.

  Squirrels leapt from branch to branch, flashes of wondrous red. Birds sang from high in the trees, and occasionally fluttered around below the cover, snatching morsels from the ground or simply singing their unknowable songs.

  Twenty minutes after leaving the house Doug shuffled the mobile phone from his pocket and dropped it as he walked. He did not worry about littering. And he felt no parting pangs.

  Newcastle was only two hundred miles away.

  “There used to be gold in these here hills,” Peter called out from where he had walked on ahead. “Even did a bit of prospecting myself. Swilled sediment around in a pan for weeks on end, anyway.”

  “Did you find anything?” Lucy-Anne asked.

  “Not a sliver, a filing or a nugget. But it was a nice few weeks, I’d take lunch with me and a good book, spend the whole day out in the wild and get back just before it was dark enough to get lost.” He had stopped, and stood staring through the last of the trees at the hillside looming above them, hands on his hips, shoulders rising and falling as he struggled for breath.

  He was an old man, Doug kept having to remind himself. They were walking too fast, rushing to get from here to there, wherever here and there were, because of what would take them soon. “We should slow down,” he said. “There’s no hurry.”

  Lucy-Anne glanced at him and smiled, her eyes glittering with tears she would never cry.

  “Strange how some metals are so valuable,” Peter continued, in a world of his own. “Strange how we’re so ignorant, we think we can classify the importance of all the things that go to make the world. Rock, now. Rock. That should be the most valuable. Holds it all together, after all.”

  “I thought gravity did that,” Doug mumbled.

  “Lithium is the lightest metal there is,” Gemma said. She had been skipping along in front of them, pausing occasionally to bend down and stare at a flower or a rock of some crawling thing. Now she became still, and as she looked up into the sky — there was nothing there to see, nothing but blue — she continued. Her voice was the voice Doug had always known, but her words, her tone, her knowledge was pure mystery.

  “It floats on water, has a specific gravity of nought-point-five-seven. Relative atomic mass six-point-nine-four-one. It’s used in batteries, and its compounds can be employed to treat manic depression. It was named in eighteen-eighteen by Jons Berzelius.” She sat down heavily and leaned forward, her head resting between her knees, talking at the ground. “But of course, it was his student Arfwedson who actually discovered it.”

  Then she was sick.

  “What the hell was that?” Doug called. “Eh? Peter? What was that?” He ran to his little girl as he shouted, barely wondering why he expected the old man to know what Gemma was talking about.

  Lucy-Anne reached her first and scooped her up, ignoring the spatter of sick that fell across her front. “Honey?” she said. “You okay? You feel okay?”

  “Headache,” Gemma said weakly, her face buried in her mother’s neck.

  Doug reached them and stood behind Lucy-Anne, smoothing damp hair from Gemma’s pale face. She was sweating, drips of it ran down and pooled darkly on Lucy-Anne’s shirt, and she stank of vomit.

/>   Yesterday dinosaurs, today lithium, Doug thought. Hell, I know nothing about lithium. Is this what they teach kids in primary school nowadays?

  Peter strolled back to them, concern creasing his brow. “What was that she said?” he asked.

  “Does it matter? She’s ill.” Lucy-Anne was angry, Doug could tell that the moment she spoke, but she did not wish to reveal it to her old uncle.

  Peter, however, was wise behind that crazy beard. “Sorry Lucy-Anne. Thoughtless of me. It’s just … well, you’ve a very bright girl there.”

  “Research into nanotechnology began in the early ‘80s,” Gemma mumbled. “And there were lots of scientists convinced —”

  “Gemma,” Doug said, confused and afraid and upset. It was not his daughter saying these things, not the Gemma he knew, the little girl who loved the Teletubbies and Winnie the Pooh and riding her tricycle and helping him dig the garden, so long as he moved all the worms out of the way because they were icky.

  This was not her.

  “Wait, leave her, listen,” Peter said.

  “ — that it would be the new engineering. The Japanese created the first robots small enough to travel through veins, shredding fatty deposits or cancerous cells. The AT & T Bell laboratories in New Jersey constructed gears smaller in diameter than a human hair, and an electric motor a tenth of a millimetre across was built … and then it went top secret, and the various bodies involved started turning the positive research to more warlike ends.” There was a pause, just long enough to mark a change of tone. “As always, Man is distinguished only by his foolishness, and nothing good can come of him.”

  “Gemma, please honey …” Lucy-Anne said, and there was such a note of helplessness in her voice that it froze them all, for just a second or two.

  Then Gemma whined, cried for a few seconds more and fell asleep.

  They could not wake her.

  Doug and Lucy-Anne refused to leave her side, so Peter hurried away and soaked his shirt in a nearby stream. He squeezed it over Gemma’s face as Doug held her in his arms. The water splashed on her skin, ran across her closed eyelids — they were twitching as her eyes rolled behind them — and they even forced some of it between her lips.