Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Awake, Rupe?” she shouted from outside my bedroom door.

  “Possibly,” I grumbled.

  “We have no eggs.”

  “I’ll just have a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea, then, please.” I clutched the blankets up under my chin and closed my eyes. “Wake me up when it’s ready.”

  “We have no bacon,” she said in a loud voice, as if she thought the door was ten or fifteen times thicker than it was. “Or bread. Or tea.”

  I tried to will myself back to sleep.

  She started to bang on the door. “Come on, Rupe. It’s getting late and my blood sugar’s low. Make a decision.”

  “I decide not to decide. Go away.”

  “Oh no you bloody well don’t.” I heard the door open, and a wave of cold air brushed over my face. “Out of your pit, Rupe, or I’ll throw this bucket of water over you.”

  I opened my eyes. “You have no bucket of water,” I said.

  She was standing at the foot of the bed, hands on hips. She was wearing two of my jumpers and a pair of my corduroy trousers, and she looked annoyed. “I can get one quickly enough.”

  “This would be infinitely easier if you’d just agree to sleep with me,” I suggested.

  “I told you right at the beginning: this is a strictly platonic deal.” She bent down and grabbed the blankets with both hands. “Besides, I hear you’re a lousy fuck.”

  “Who told you that? No! Araminta, don’t do that.” She was curling the edge of the blankets in her hands and giving me an evil smile. “Come on, Araminta. Just five more –” With a magician’s flourish, she hauled the blankets off the bed and onto the floor, leaving me curling up on the mattress. “Oh, you cow...”

  “Bugger me, Rupe,” she said indignantly, looking down at me. “You’ve got half your clothes on under there. You can’t possibly be cold.”

  BECAUSE THE HEATING had failed, there was no hot water. I couldn’t be bothered to boil some on the cooker; I staggered into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, splashed cold water on my face, and decided to forget about shaving.

  Araminta was on the phone to the Porter when I came back into the living room. “Now, I know it’s not your fault, Mr Arblaster,” she was saying, “but this flat is fucking cold.”

  I put my hand to my face. To my knowledge, no one had ever used the word ‘fuck’ to Arblaster during his thousand years or so as Porter of my building. He had the serene calm of an embalmed holy man, and nothing ever seemed to surprise or bother him. Araminta was something from far outside his experience, not least because she insisted on calling him ‘Mr’ rather than just using his surname like everybody else. None of us knew if he even had another name.

  “Well that’s as may be,” she told the phone. She listened for a moment. “I’ll come down and have a look at the buggering boiler myself, then.” Another pause to listen. She smiled at me. “All right, Mr Arblaster. Thank you. Oh, and the Doctor seems to have run out of food. We need bacon and eggs and sausages and bread and tea. Lots of tea, Mr Arblaster. My blood sugar is down around my ankles; I’m starting to get giddy. Marmalade, Mr Arblaster. And jam, strawberry if you can get it. And a kwass on. Pardon? Oh. No, of course. Okay, then. Thank you.” She hung up the phone and smiled at me again. “Love your jimjams,” she told me.

  I had gone to bed wearing three pairs of socks, an old pair of cords, and a jumper over my pyjama jacket. I said, “I can’t believe I’m indoors and I can still see my breath.” I breathed a plume of mist and pointed at it, to illustrate my point.

  “Mr Arblaster says he’ll call an engineer presently,” she said, putting the phone back on the side table. “And he’s sending up breakfast things.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk to him like that.”

  “He loves it. He lives to serve.”

  “What’s a kwass on?”

  ARBLASTER MAY NOT have quite comprehended Araminta, but it was quite possible that he had fallen in love with her, because he somehow found bacon, eggs, sausage, marmalade, strawberry jam, bread and tea from somewhere, and had them sent up to my rooms less than thirty minutes after their conversation. The quantities were small and the quality poor, but it was a miracle he’d managed to get hold of anything at all.

  “You have to admit, I have my uses,” she said, mopping up the last of her fried egg with a wad of bread.

  “You are, without a doubt, the most remarkable person I have ever met,” I said in moment of candour.

  She grinned in a pantomime of shyness. “Oh, Rupe, you smooth-talking bastard.”

  I finished my third cup of tea. Breakfast had thawed me out enough to feel my toes again. “Busy day?”

  She looked thoughtful. “First Year lecture on Fielding. Second Year tutorial on Doctor Johnson.” She pulled a face. “God, I hate Johnson, he’s such a pompous shit. Anyway, after that it’s a free period right up to lunch. Want to have lunch with me?”

  “I’ve got an appointment later. I’m going to be away all day.”

  She favoured me with her hard stare. “And what’s more important than having lunch with me?”

  I shrugged. “It’s something I organised weeks ago. Hard to get appointments. I can’t miss it or I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks.”

  Araminta sighed theatrically. “Okay. I’ll just have a ham roll and a beer at the pub on my own.” She grinned slyly. “Maybe some young bloke there will catch my eye, eh?”

  “I’m not a jealous man,” I told her. “But please stop emphasising ‘young,’ will you?”

  I SAW ARAMINTA off to her lecture, then I wrapped myself up in several layers of clothing, went downstairs, unlocked my bicycle from the rack, and pedalled off towards Science City.

  A kwass on, it seemed, was a breakfast pastry popular in School 902 but unknown everywhere else. Araminta claimed to miss them so much that she was thinking of setting up a bakery of her own. I promised to mention it to Rossiter. I didn’t tell her that our stocks of flour were very low, and that if this year’s cereal crops failed – a not unusual occurrence – we would all be in big trouble. Another reason to be in a hurry to get out of here. As if I needed another one.

  Hundreds of cyclists, bundled up like myself, were pedalling in an unhurried fashion along University Avenue. I joined them, pulling my cap down low and bending over the handlebars so nobody would recognise me and start shouting stupid questions about when the Old Board were going to go on trial. I hated it when that happened.

  It was fifteen miles, as the crow flew, from my Residence to Science City. The most direct route was University Avenue, which was so straight it could have been laid out by the aforementioned crow. Unfortunately, it ran up several steep hills, and I wasn’t nearly fit enough to tackle all of them and still have a meeting afterwards, so I turned off University Avenue after a couple of miles and cycled through The Park.

  Here there were fewer cyclists. I sat up in my seat and pushed up the brim of my cap. Now that exertion had generated some heat in my body, the day seemed merely crisp, rather than mind-numbingly cold. Dozens of people were fishing from the banks of West Lake, and I silently wished them luck. I’d tried that myself; there was nothing larger than algae in West Lake, and there was a quiet research project going on to see if we could eat that.

  The Campus was made up of four hundred Schools, scattered over an area about two hundred miles across and surrounded by mountains. Opinions differed over whether we sat in the bottom of the caldera of an ancient supervolcano, which was a charming thought, or the crater of a colossal prehistoric meteor strike, but to be honest nobody was thinking very hard about those theories at the moment.

  School 1 was the administrative heart of the Campus. It was situated in the northeast, within sight of the Mountains, and it was the site of almost all the Faculty buildings. These had all been built two hundred years ago, when the Campus was founded, and they all looked roughly alike – austere stone blocks faced with many windows and roofed with copper. The earliest Residences looked much the same,
but later ones, built as the population grew, were in a progression of more modern styles, although the Revolution had left many of them damaged and in some cases entirely uninhabitable.

  Science City was different. It sat at the edge of School 1 like a colossal parasitic growth. It had originally just been the Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Engineering Faculties, buildings not unlike the others in the School, but down the years it had spread and grown and added more Faculties in a confusion of architectures, and now it was just what its nickname suggested, a little city, some of whose buildings were twenty or thirty stories tall, and dominated by the glass and steel spike of the Architects’ Tower. You could see it from miles away, rising out of the rich wooded land beside the River. It was a horrible place to visit; the paved plazas between the buildings were sterile and echoey and the wind blew through them all the time. I hated it.

  The people who ran Science City – and there was a very real sense that it was actually a separate entity, rather than part of the School or indeed part of the Campus – had returned the favour by making it quite difficult for me to visit. For all official meetings, I had to put in a request weeks in advance, and there was never any guarantee that those requests would be granted. If I turned up unannounced, I always seemed to attract the attention of one or more Students, who would accompany me everywhere while engaging me in pleasant conversation about the weather or Student politics until I wanted to punch them.

  I wasn’t sure quite what to make of this, so I hadn’t done anything about it yet, and the Science Faculty Heads and I existed, for the moment, in a kind of standoff. They turned up to Board meetings occasionally, and we smiled at each other over tea and biscuits, all the while having a shrewd idea what was going through each others’ heads. Nobody was kidding anybody.

  Years ago, the various subject Faculties had merged into one huge Science Faculty, which was housed in a bizarre faceted glass and steel building which, from the outside anyway, looked as if it was perpetually on the verge of toppling over and rolling away. I parked my bike outside and chained it to a piece of statuary that looked like a spiral staircase made of billiard balls and stood for a few moments, looking about me. No sign of any eager, happy Students, although I suspected one or two would turn up if I deviated from the plan for today’s meeting. I took off my hat, combed my fingers through my hair, removed my bicycle clips, and pushed my way through the Faculty’s huge glass double-doors.

  The entire ground floor of the Faculty was empty, a single huge room floored with something that looked like marble but swallowed the sound of your footsteps when you walked on it. From inside, it was impossible to see how the building was supported; there was nothing but the glass walls and the floor and the textured ceiling, and above that the weight of the Faculty eternally poised to come crushing down. I always felt my shoulders hunch up around my ears when I came in here, which was probably the point.

  About fifteen minutes’ walk away across the not-marble floor, there was a doughnut-shaped desk, and beside that was a single staircase which poked down out of the ceiling like a tongue. I trekked across to the desk and gave my name to the smiling Student standing behind it. She in turn made quite a show of consulting a large appointment book, before smiling at me again.

  “You’re early, Professor,” she told me pleasantly.

  “I took a short-cut,” I said.

  She glanced down at her appointment book, then looked up at me and smiled sunnily. “You will have your little joke, Professor.”

  “Whenever possible,” I said.

  “Someone will be down for you shortly,” she informed me. “You’re welcome to wait.”

  “Thank you,” I said, genuinely curious about what else she expected me to do. I certainly wasn’t going to do the walk from the desk to the doors and back again. We stood there for a minute or so, me looking around the foyer and trying not to be intimidated by the ceiling, she making little notes in her appointment book. Visitor was early. Joked about it.

  I said, “Nice weather.”

  She looked up from her notes. “Beg pardon?”

  “The weather. Nice.”

  She glanced at the faraway glass wall. “Bit chilly this morning, I thought.”

  “Bracing,” I said. “I thought it was more bracing than chilly.”

  She thought about this, and all the time the smile never left her face. “Yes,” she said finally. “It could have been bracing.”

  “It was chilly,” said a deep, pleasant voice from above our heads. “Technically.”

  We both looked up. A tall, handsome man wearing flannel trousers and a shirt and tie was standing on the stairs. I said, “Is there a scale?”

  He chuckled and descended the rest of the steps into the foyer. “There certainly is. The Penman-Walworth Scale. It’s almost a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “It’s amazing what people will do when they’re bored,” I told him. “Personally, I like to catalogue my bookshelves.”

  We shook hands and he treated me to a look at his perfect white smile. “Glad you could come,” he told me.

  “As I remember, it was me who asked to see you,” I said, just so both he and the Student knew where we all stood.

  His smile didn’t falter. “Of course,” he said. “Has Claire been looking after you?”

  We both looked at Claire, who blushed ever so faintly. I said, “Claire has been very efficient,” which made her smile dim a fraction.

  “Good,” he said. “Good. Well, shall we...?”

  “Yes,” I said, turning towards the stairs with a great deal more confidence than I felt. “Let’s.”

  The stairs at the Science Faculty were one of the spookiest things I had ever seen. Like the building itself, they seemed to be supported by some arcane and counterintuitive engineering trick rather than by more reliable bricks and mortar, but that wasn’t what scared me about them. Every step was an inch-thick slab of glass. Edge-on, they were an emerald green colour, but when you were standing on them they were completely clear and very nearly invisible. Walking on them was like ascending slowly, step by step, into thin air, and I didn’t like it at all.

  There was no handrail, either, although someone had stuck gummed paper tape on each step to show the unwary where each one was. Somehow, this made it even worse, following a kinked line of brown tape that seemed to float on nothing.

  I got myself up the stairs by concentrating on the Dean of the Science Faculty beside me. He was about five years older than me, and he had the clean, well-exercised look of a man who plays a lot of team sports and is rarely on the losing side. His hair was thick and brown and curly and touched a little with grey at the temples, his clothes discreetly expensive-looking. He radiated masculine bonhomie like a nicely bedded-in coal fire.

  Thankfully, above the foyer level the building became considerably less alarming. On the first floor were corridors and offices and common rooms, and it was easy to imagine stout support pillars holding everything up. Even the stairs were of the more mundane type, the kind you could actually see.

  “While you’re here, I thought we might clear the air a little,” he said as we walked.

  “Oh?”

  “There needs to be an attitude of trust between us all, I think you’ll agree.”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “We can’t rebuild if we’re constantly seeing conspiracy theories under every stone.”

  “Callum,” I said, “I’m trying to get us all out of here. I couldn’t care less about rebuilding.”

  He glanced at me. “People will want to stay,” he said. “Their homes are here.”

  “If they want to stay, great. Good for them. But we’re only one bad Winter away from starving.”

  We both fell silent for a little while, thinking about the most recent bad Winter. I resisted the urge to ask him just where that had sat on the Penman-Walworth Scale. Callum opened a door and led me into a small office. Not his – his was higher up in the building – but a spare room, ba
re of personal touches. Just a table and a couple of chairs and an oddly-shaped window looking down onto the plaza. I went over to the window and looked out; Callum sprawled in one of the chairs.

  I said, “I put in a request four months ago, in writing, for copies of your Faculty records, and so far I’ve had no reply.” I heard him snort dismissively, behind me, and I said, “These things are important, Callum. We still don’t know half the things the Old Board did, and we’re not going to find out any time soon if the records are full of holes.”

  “I’ll see your request is complied with,” he said. “But you didn’t come all this way just to poke me about records.”

  I said, “Someone here’s running a still.”

  He burst out laughing. “What?”

  I turned from the window. “Someone here’s running a still and distributing whisky around the School. It’s not bad, actually. Whoever it is has had a lot of practice.”

  He was still laughing. “Oh, for –”

  “And drugs. Pep pills, mostly. Some of the work gangs have been caught with them.”

  He stopped laughing and looked levelly at me. “And your proof that these things originate here is...?” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “You have none.”

  “It’s science stuff, Callum,” I said. “I don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to make an educated guess where it’s coming from.”

  He shrugged. “We’re far from the only people to have that kind of expertise.”

  “But you are more or less the only people with the raw materials. Particularly for the drugs. And it’s being done on a large scale.”

  Callum examined his fingernails. “I won’t have you trampling all over my Faculty,” he told me. “The Old Board did that. We never got anything done.”

  “Well, it sounds to me as if some of your smart little Students are getting a bit much done right now, Callum,” I told him. “This stuff breeds crime, and that’s the last thing we need right now.”

  He looked at me. “Isn’t this a bit... domestic for your brief?”