by Nic Low
I began to suspect that the Frenchman was a fool. But I was not going to refuse a shirt. To be caught in my own uniform was to be shot. I unbuttoned and handed my shirt to the native.
Here, I murmured, trying to apologise with my eyes. What is your name?
His name is Luang, Louis said. Those are his children.
I had not noticed the two small figures curled beside the shack. They were awake, dark eyes watching their father.
He agitates in secret for decolonisation, Louis said. I know that. He knows that. And now he wears the uniform of those who would die for France!
Luang looked away. He seemed upset.
He is a good man, Louis said. He is only treasonous because he imagines life will be better for his children without us. But of course there will be no mutiny. There is no history here. Nothing changes.
But I have come, I said.
Certainly, Louis said. And there was one before you, and there will be one after.
But you, I said. Who was here before you?
He smiled at that, his thin moist lips stretched across stained teeth. Before me?
I arrived in an alien season, neither summer nor autumn nor winter nor spring. The sky was a tumescent weight. The afternoons swelled but did not burst, and I felt my head would burst instead. I was glad, for there was not the meanest crevice left for thought.
We stepped from the barges at a place the natives knew as Nong Khiaw. We made a gloomy camp above that wide brown serpent where it twisted south. Someone had been here before us: the ruin of a sad thatched hut, and a table on cleared ground. I sat at this table and surveyed the land. High cliffs of limestone rose on three sides, and the verdant jungle tumbled down. It was a fine vantage. How strange to kick a cross in the dirt, and here would be a city!
All this I wrote in my dispatch. But my secret reason lay within the sombre darkness of the place, in the heat hanging thick upon us like damnation. For surely here was the end of the earth: the furthest one could get from the Eiffel Tower, that stiletto through the heart of the city I had loved. Paris seemed to me now some lost and insane dream, and my lover’s face but a face glimpsed once in a crowded station. They told me white men cannot work in the tropics. They go mad in the heat. That is why they sent me here, and that is why I came. It is a neat justice when the punishment pleases both the guilty and the dead.
I ordered my possessions be unloaded from the boats. The coolies dragged them up, a chain of ants carrying off the artefacts of some junked civilisation. They dropped my velvet chaise longue, and as it cartwheeled and smashed apart upon the mud I laughed like a horse. One simply must own a chaise longue in Paris. Here, one must simply throw the bloated thing into a river.
By day’s end I was drunk. I sat at that rough wooden table with my worldly goods, obedient and useless, arranged beneath chandeliers of jungle fruit. It seemed the walls of my house in le seizième had dissolved within the swarming dusk, and just the furniture remained. I toasted the mahogany dining table. I toasted the high-backed chairs. I toasted the profound emptiness of my feather bed.
Sir.
One of my soldiers stood before me; and behind him, a native with clinging child. The native seemed distressed.
Sir, the soldier said. We can find no nails among the supplies.
This is most dismaying, I said. The stew will be bland.
The man did not laugh. His face was not unkind, but distaste made it ugly. He knew why I had been sent here.
Sir, we have dispatched a boat, but it will be some weeks before a dwelling can be built. We fear for your furniture.
Let the furniture rot, I said. I have brandy to last two hundred years. Who is this man?
He would speak with you, sir. He says this is his house and table.
He lives here?
Sir. He was away when we arrived. He brings you a gift.
The native offered a clay flagon. I unstoppered it: sweet ghastly fumes, a mouthful of fire. Men crawling through paddies. Black tongues and stones for eyes. Flames.
What is this? I asked.
Laos-laos. A strong spirit.
And his name?
The soldier asked the man, and the man moved his mouth. To me it sounded like Luang, meaning town or place in the native tongue. It was as good a name as any.
Tell Luang he may work for me. I shall want more of his medicine. And bring me my pipe.
The soldiers lit the lamps and retired. The coolies sat off down beside the river, living in another century, and it was just myself and this fellow Luang. He stood in the doorway of the hut and watched me at his table. His mouth was a dark line. I dragged a leather armchair to the light.
Drink with me, I said.
Beneath the lamps, the man seemed older. Older and stranger, and yet I felt I could know him. There were lines raked about his eyes and down his cheeks as on my own. His black hair was drifting to a coarsened silver, and he perched uncertainly on the chair. We drank together, heads back, throats exposed. He watched me all the way down, like a bird with a snake.
Do you hate France? I asked.
He made no reply.
Of course you do not, I said. You cannot hate that which you do not know. You cannot even speak of it. But I can. I have come in the name of France, and I would erase France from the face of the earth. I would erase all countries and all nations. It is not the scandal. Scandal is not the end of the world. It is everything else. Everything that would make us scandalous.
I laughed at my own wit. I laughed, but the spectre of scandal had been raised, and now it must be drowned.
I took up my pipe, and turned the ivory in my hand. The piece was old, from a bazaar in Rangoon. I turned down the lamps and opened my pores, and I bent to the flame. I took the future into my lungs.
We are not here to forget what we have done, I said, letting the smoke curl between us, thin and lazy, a riddle too banal to solve. We are not fools. The past will not hurt us. It is the future we must forget. We are here to escape what we will surely do.
From the river, the deranged stridency of frogs. Sweat ran and dripped from my brow in quickening rhythms. I drew down again upon the smoke, and I closed my eyes and it was suddenly there above us: the great wounded bird of progress. Steel talons reaching forth, its eyes put out, buckshot burning in its wings. The limestone crags were lit with fire, horizon to horizon, the clouds aflame. The jungle should burn and the cities should burn. I heard a mechanical screaming, felt iron and bone beneath my skin, saw her face, saw fields of corpses, cities of glass, cities of tents, rivers of ice, of people, faces, dreams, light, all—cancelled.
I lunged towards the native and the table tipped. The lanterns fell, blue fire breaking in waves across the ground. He leapt back from his chair, and I was in the dirt on my hands and knees.
The future must never reach us here, I cried out. Never. Surely you must understand.
Luang stood away at a distance, looking like one who has eaten meat that has turned. Then he came slowly forward, and crouched and peered into my face, and his eyes softened. I saw then that he had not understood. He had not understood at all.
DATA FURNACE
I TAKE the London Overground to work—on foot. Snow crunches and squeaks beneath my boots. The last train to run this line’s a rusted carcass, buried in a snowdrift at the bottom of the Surrey Quays cutting.
I work in IT. Before the Switch I was fat and timid, and I thought it was my fault. It’s amazing how little of anything is your fault. Live in an era where you stumble out of bed and catch the train to work: you’re fat. Live in an era where you stumble to work in knee-deep snow: no gym class can match that. I feel fit and decisive.
I leave the train line and cross the ice downriver of Tower Bridge. The wind-blasted shell of City Hall, the gutted apartments along the reach of the Thames, the abandoned spires of the City: they’re all so deformed by frost they look like they were designed by children. An evacuation plane struggles overhead. I choose not to watch. It feels like every last breath of heat has been sucked from the world.
Which is typical, really. The rest of the planet’s on its way to burning up, and we get an ice age. Thank you, Britain, you miserable bastard.
From Wapping I detour west to wait for my workmate Umi in the usual spot, beneath the memorial to the Great Fire of London. I don’t know how you’d commemorate the desperate bonfire that’s consuming the city today. When the freeze slammed down it was firewood and coal first, then the Regency tables and Ikea chairs, the carpets and floorboards, staircases and doors, towels, TVs, PlayStations, sex toys, tyres, dead animals, corpses—all burned.
I check my phone. Seven forty-eight. Umi’s running late, but then, she’s not expecting me. I’ve been at the airport for the best part of a month, waiting with my family for an evac flight. I click the phone off and check my reflection in the empty screen: a small, hopeful face smudged behind thick glasses and beard. An old man’s face, Marie says, though I’m not yet forty. I blink, trying to remember my speech.
Footsteps make me turn. At the edge of the square, a tall figure in blazing red stands in the cold steel light.
George?
Umi! I yell.
She strides across the square, her energetic face full of worry. What happened to your flight?
Marie and Jordan made it out, I say. Last night.
What about you?
I meet Umi’s gaze, and just like that my decisiveness flees. I look away.
Tell me you didn’t put off leaving again, Umi says.
No, I mumble. I—missed the plane.
Oh, George! Umi says, with such exasperation that I realise this is the easiest lie. No one would believe me capable of more, or less.
They called the names and ten minutes later it was gone, I say. I was getting coffee.
Umi’s hand goes to her mouth.
It wasn’t even a very good coffee. The milk was burned.
George! Where are Marie and Jordan? Do you know who took them in?
I shake my head.
You should be at the airport. Find where they landed, get the next flight.
They said I had no chance. Miss a flight, back of the queue. It’ll be months.
I know people at London City Airport. Let me make some calls.
The airports are all shutting down for winter, Umi. Maybe for good.
We’ll find you the money for a private evac. It’s not—
I’m bloody well staying! I shout.
I’m not sure which of us is more surprised. In the silence that follows, I hear someone singing, slow and childlike, in a neighbouring street.
Umi stares at me. You still don’t want to leave, do you?
You don’t, I say. You think we’re going to be fine. You think humans can adapt. You’ve told me a thousand—
I’m not married, George.
I don’t want to talk about it, I say. Let’s go to work.
Umi stamps her feet in the cold. Your wife and son are gone, and you’re coming in to work?
We’re out of coffee at home.
Stop it.
Well, how else am I going to keep warm?
Umi looks up at the monument’s frozen flame. Good question, she says.
Work is the Isle of Dogs Secure Data Centre. Umi and I are systems administrators. We’ve got four thousand servers locked in an old Victorian factory, hosting most of what’s left of Britain’s internet. The building’s a jumble of towers, silos and gantries, built like an industrial cathedral, so heavy and sheer it could have been carved from solid brick. A flaking billboard takes up half the back wall. The slogan’s gone, but you can still make out a woman’s giant face. She looks like Margaret Thatcher, only hot, and encased in ice.
Inside the front door, I lean my baseball bat in the corner and brush snow from my beard. It’s been a month but nothing’s changed. Old Man Canary’s already awake. He’s a cheerful old homeless guy the boss lets live in the stairwell. His rheumy eyes peer out at us from his nest of green sleeping bags.
Back? he says, giving me a gummy grin.
I missed you too much, I say.
Here you go, friend, Umi says.
Today she’s brought him two bread rolls. He pops one under each armpit to thaw. She films him on her phone.
Yes! he chortles. Winning!
Umi uploads the clip on our way up the stairs. The heat-stroked outside world is obsessed with videos of the stupid shit people do here to keep warm. My favourite’s a group of teenagers driving a herd of cows up the stairs to their Hyde Park penthouse squat.
I’m smiling when we reach the disguised security door on the top floor, but straight away I get the feeling something’s wrong. Umi’s stopped talking, and I realise it’s dangerously quiet. She opens the rusted fuse box on the wall and presses her thumb to the scanner. The door hisses open.
After the derelict stairwell it’s like walking into a spaceship: long, gleaming aisles of black servers stacked ten high in glass-fronted cabinets. Bundles of cable branch overhead like arteries. Dotted among the servers are the towering remnants of the original factory machinery, all soot-iron black and thick with rust. High windows throw a glacial light across the ancient engines, pistons and gears. Everything stands dormant, like the frozen carcasses of long extinct species. Without the heat from the server exhaust fans it’s unbelievably cold.
On the far side of the room Joe, the old French guy who owns the place, is sitting on the edge of his desk. He knocks snow from his woollen cap onto the floor. He looks round and his smile drops away.
George! he barks. You put off going again?
I missed my flight, I say, crossing the floor. What’s going on?
Your flight? Joe says. What about Marie, and—
Gone, I say. Safe. Given a knighthood.
But—
Why’s everything off?
Joe stares at me, and shakes his head. It’s time for me to go too, he says.
I feel like I’ve been winded.
You see this? Joe says, and for the first time I notice his swollen face. I got jumped in Greenwich. They shot my outrider and I was lucky to get away. I can’t wait for winter either; I’m not getting any younger. I hate to shut th
is place down, but I have to go.
I don’t know what to say. I look over at Umi. Normally she’s so full of ideas that there’s no point in bothering with your own. Now she just shrugs. I give her a look like, what the hell—you knew about this?
What are we supposed to do? I say to Joe.
I waited till you were meant to be gone, he says. Go back to the airport.
You can’t leave.
Joe raises his frosty eyebrows.
It can’t last, I say. It switched, so it has to switch back. It’s not so bad.
Joe crosses to the fire door. He shoots back the bolts and swings it open. Sunlight slices across the vast confusion of snow-collapsed roofs. In the distance, the toppled London Eye looks more like an ear.
Not so bad? he says.
Could be worse.
Joe laughs. It will be worse, and you’re too scared to move. Did you ever hear about how to boil a frog?
How to what?
Boil a frog. You take a frog, and put him in a pot of boiling water, and he jumps right out. But you put him in cold water and turn up the heat, nice and slow? He stays until he is cooked.
The old geezer’s lost his mind.
He gestures to the fire escape. I’ve put it off long enough, he says. Sometimes you just know when it’s time to jump.
What, out the fire escape?
A metaphor, George. I’m going to Laos.
When? I ask.
Joe checks the time on his phone. Soon.
Today?
Umi’s already shut most of this down. We weld the doors shut, and if things get better like you say, we’ll come back.
You’re just abandoning all this?
Joe looks pained. What can I do? We’ve abandoned the whole country. I lock up, and I hope.
