Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  While my mind attempted to process this, there was a terrible noise and something like a howling box crossed the sky. As I watched, slack-jawed, the children threw more stones at me. I was in Europe, and it was a madhouse.

  THE CHILDREN EVENTUALLY got bored, or tired, or hungry, and went away. The flying box returned, came to an impossible complete stop in mid-air for a few moments, then flew off again, and I was alone on the river. On the other bank, I saw a man and a woman walking along holding hands, and another younger woman pushing some kind of small cart. They barely spared me a glance.

  I had no idea what the air smelled of. There was an underlying acridness to it, below other more familiar smells of river and mud and grass. The noise was an unending rumble, low and quiet, and it seemed to come from all directions, broken occasionally by louder but no more identifiable sounds.

  I couldn’t find my way back.

  I paddled back the way I had come and went back and forth along the riverbank, but I couldn’t find the little river. I rowed out into the middle of the stream and sat there, looking at the bank, trying to find some clue, but I couldn’t see anything. I moved back in and tried again. Nothing.

  After an hour or so of rising panic, I was exhausted. I could barely raise my arms to paddle. I let myself drift along until I came to a place where the bank had collapsed, and I pulled in, got out of the canoe, and with the last of my strength dragged it as far from the water as I could. I took a few steps up the slope of collapsed mud and froze.

  The river – the Trent – ran through an area of scrubby grass, and beyond that was a tide of houses as far as the eye could see, all of them identical. It was the same on the other side of the river. I sank to my knees, and then I must have passed out for a while.

  4

  I ALMOST LOST my mind in the first few hours. And then I almost got myself killed.

  It was called Nottingham and there were more people here than on the entire Campus. I had never seen so many people in one place before. More people than in my universe. They were loud and rude and careless and oddly-dressed and they had strange accents, but they spoke recognisable English. The roads were full of... vehicles. Large and small, in many colours, noisy and apparently self-propelled. Some of the large ones seemed to be public transport of some kind – at least, they were transporting lots of people. I should have stayed by the river, tried again to find my way back home, but I was overwhelmed by Europe. It terrified me and fascinated me, and I wanted to see more, and I wandered off.

  When I came to my senses again, I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the Trent. I was standing in a sort of pedestrian arcade, with tall buildings on either side of me. Crowds were bustling by around me, some of them looking at me, most of them not. Everyone looked sleek and well-fed, often to the point of being fat. Many of them had very dark skin. I tried not to stare.

  I went over to one of the buildings. The ground floor had one enormous window, through which I could see more people browsing through racks of clothes. My reflection in the window looked awful. The side of my face was bruised, my hair was all over the place, my clothes looked wrong. Compared to the other people here I looked scrawny, like a stick man. I had the wide-eyed look of a lunatic, and I was dressed to match.

  I kept moving, and came to a large square with an impressive-looking building on one side. There were benches around the edge of the square, and I sat down on one and tried to will my heart to slow down. As I watched, something not unlike a small train but without a locomotive rumbled along the street alongside the square. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing. Araminta had come to the Campus and she had fitted right in, but I could barely cope with what I was seeing, let alone function in any meaningful way. I thought of her, waiting by the river. Going away. Coming back half an hour or so later. And again, and again. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Panic got the better of me. I surged to my feet and turned and walked out of the square, stepped out across the road without bothering to look, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with a ring of concerned faces looking down at me.

  “It’s all right, mate,” said one of the faces. “Just lie there. Ambulance is coming.”

  I tried to sit up, but my arms and legs seemed uncoordinated. My whole right side hurt.

  “Stupid fucker just stepped right out in front of me,” said another of the faces. “You saw him, didn’t you? Wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t stop.”

  “Bet he’s drunk,” said another.

  “He doesn’t smell of alcohol,” said another. “Maybe he’s sick. Are you not feeling very well, lovey?” This last addressed to me.

  “I have to go home,” I said weakly. “I can’t stay here.”

  “Best you let the doc check you out,” said the first voice. “You’ve had a bit of a knock.” In the distance, I heard a strange ululating noise. It was so odd that at first I thought it was coming from inside my own head, but I heard the voice say, “Here they come, mate. Not long now. They’ll look after you.”

  A few moments later, the noise arrived nearby and two people in green uniforms came to look at me. They asked me some questions I was in no state to answer, shone a light in my eyes, felt my limbs, fastened a collar around my neck, then put me on a trolley and loaded the trolley into a box-like yellow vehicle. The noise began again, and the vehicle moved off. I started to scream.

  “MALE, APPROXIMATELY FORTY years,” said one of the green-uniformed people as they wheeled me into yet another madhouse. “RTA. Kid on a scooter knocked him over on the Market Square. Doesn’t seem seriously hurt, didn’t lose consciousness, but he seems confused.”

  A woman with a dark brown face leaned over me. She was wearing some kind of blue loose-fitting tunic and trousers. She said, “What’s your name, lovey?”

  “Rupert,” I said.

  “Hello, Rupert, I’m Sonia. Do you know where you are?”

  I tipped my head to one side. The place was brightly lit and smelled of antiseptic. Rows of people were sitting everywhere, some of them apparently injured, all of them bored.

  “Hospital,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Sonia. “You’re at the Queen’s Medical Centre. Can you remember having a little accident?”

  “A kid,” I said. “A scooter. Market Square.”

  Sonia beamed. “That’s right, lovey.” I wished everyone would stop calling me ‘lovey.’ “We’re just going to have a little look at you. Is there anyone we can call?”

  “No,” I said.

  Sonia’s smile didn’t diminish. I’d never met such a relentlessly happy person before. “Okay, not to worry. Can you tell me your address? Where you’re from?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not to worry,” Sonia said again. She looked at the green-uniformed people. “It’s okay, lads, we’ll take care of him.”

  THEY WHEELED ME into a curtained-off cubicle and made me take off my clothes and put on a flimsy cloth gown thing with confusing fastenings, then they made me lie on an uncomfortable bed and I was left alone for some time listening to the various noises of the hospital.

  After a while, an exhausted-looking young woman wearing maroon clothes came to look at me. She asked me some questions, most of which I answered in the negative, and she poked and prodded me, and then she went away again.

  I heard her outside talking to Sonia. “He’s not seriously hurt,” she said, “but he has borderline malnutrition. You say he has nowhere to go?” Sonia must have nodded, because I heard the woman say, “I’m a little concerned about the head injury. Can we admit him?”

  Sonia said something about beds.

  “Well, I’m not happy about letting him go,” said the woman’s voice. “Get him x-rayed and we’ll take it from there, okay?”

  Another wait. A burly man in blue clothes came with a wheelchair and he wheeled me through the chaos of the hospital. The place seemed colossal, a maze of corridors and sick people. Everyone seemed to be talking quite quietly, but it w
as still impossibly noisy.

  I was left for a while in a room beside a big metal and glass sculpture which clicked and hummed and moved of its own accord, then I was taken back to Sonia, who told me, “We’ve found you a bed for tonight, lovey. We just want to make sure that head injury’s not more serious than it looks.” And I was taken away again in the wheelchair, deeper and higher in the bowels of the hospital, to a ward full of patients and strange bleeping devices, and I spent my first night in Europe in the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.

  THE NEXT MORNING, one of the ward nurses came to see me and asked me how I’d slept. I told her I had slept very well, although the truth was that sleep had been all but impossible. The ward was full of people who moaned and cried and called out all night, and every two hours a nurse had come to see if I was all right. I couldn’t see how anyone could sleep in that, but I had actually nodded off for an hour or so.

  Another woman in maroon clothes came to see me, and she didn’t look as if she had slept any better than I had. She asked me some questions, got one of the nurses to take some blood, wrote something on a sheaf of paper fastened to a clipboard.

  Not long after that, a woman came round with a trolley and I was given a cup of sweet milky tea and some small biscuits. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. I ate all the biscuits without tasting them, particularly, drank the tea in two swallows, and when the woman came back down the ward I asked her for more.

  All she did was laugh. “Cheeky,” she said, and moved on without stopping.

  An hour or so later, my clothes were returned to me, and I was asked to dress again. Someone came round with some forms that I had to sign, and half an hour after that, feeling stiff and bruised and hungry, I found myself standing outside the Queen’s Medical Centre.

  I heard someone call my name, and when I looked round I saw Sonia hurrying up to me.

  “I hoped I hadn’t missed you,” she said. “Look, if you’ve got nowhere else to go, you could try here,” she said, offering me a folded piece of notepaper. “Saint Kat’s are good. Better than most, anyway. They’ll look after you. And here.” She held out another folded piece of paper, this one brightly and intricately coloured. “Get yourself something to eat, lovey. You’re half starved.”

  I looked at the two pieces of paper. “I need to go to the Trent,” I told her. “I left my canoe there.”

  She nodded and patted me on the shoulder. “Of course you do, lovey. But pop into Saint Kat’s first, eh? Ask for Barry. Say I sent you; he’ll see you right. Got to go; I’m on shift. Take care.” And with that, she was gone.

  And so began my second day in Europe.

  5

  ST KATHERINE’S REFUGE For the Homeless – St Kat’s to its habitués – was a former department store on the edge of the centre of the city, a huge building on many floors. The department store had gone bust in the early 2010s and had remained vacant for years until being bought by a charity to cater for the growing population of homeless people in the area.

  This information courtesy of Murchison, a wiry little chap with a strong accent who sat down beside me during lunch on my first day and elected himself as my guide into this new world.

  Murchison was Scottish, from a place which had once been part of ‘Britain’ but was now independent. ‘Britain’ had once been part of Europe, but now was not. Or maybe it was. Murchison was hazy on the details, preferring to blame his own personal woes and the woes of the country in general on something he called ‘cunting Tories.’ Murchison drank a lot. You weren’t supposed to be able to get a bed at St Kat’s if you had a drink or drug problem, but that was wildly impractical and a lot of the residents spent their days wandering around the centre of Nottingham, drinking beer from tins and keeping an eye out for the police or private security guards or anyone else who looked likely to move them on.

  Murchison and St Kat’s were full of surprising information, but at the moment every piece of information was surprising. The hostel had a small library of battered reference books, largely unused because the majority of the residents were unable to read. On my first morning, after being shown around by Barry, the large, jolly man who ran the place, I sat myself down in one of the broken chairs in the library, picked up an encyclopaedia, and began to read.

  Nottingham was in England, and England had once been part of the United Kingdom. Scotland and Wales had declared independence about twenty years ago, and there was a small civil war going on in the West, where a county named Cornwall was trying to do the same. England was part of an island off the northern coast of Europe. Europe was too big to try to learn about all in one go.

  I was already long overdue back on the Campus. Araminta, if she had any sense at all, would have gone to ground by now. I reasoned that I could stay here a day or so, learn as much as I could, and perhaps go back with some useful perspective on what the Science Faculty were doing.

  So I learned about motor cars and helicopters and money – Sonia had given me a £20 note when I left the hospital, and it went a surprisingly long way in one or other of the Pound Shops in town – and the Xian Flu and polities. I learned about London. The food at St Kat’s was some of the best I’d tasted in years, although Murchison and the others were always griping about it, and it wasn’t a bad place to stay so long as you kept an eye out for people trying to steal your belongings and didn’t get involved in one of the several fights which broke out each day.

  England – Britain, Europe, the whole world – had gone through a terrible time. A series of economic collapses had come one after the other in the early years of the century, and then the flu had gone through the population like a scythe. Countries had fractured, and then fractured again. A railway line that crossed the Continent had declared itself a sovereign nation. I couldn’t begin to understand how it must have been to live through all that; until the Fall, the Campus had remained the same for centuries. I was only now starting to understand just how small and primitive my world had been, only now starting to appreciate what we must have looked like to Araminta.

  There were practicalities to be addressed. Here, you needed money to do pretty much anything. On the Campus, our Faculties had provided everything, but here, if you wanted a meal or clothing or a bicycle, you had to buy it. You did jobs for money, but there were no jobs, hadn’t been for years. Murchison and some of the others spent days sitting on the pavement in town, looking pathetic, and sometimes passers-by gave them money, but they had to be careful because begging was one of the offences that could get you kicked out of St Kat’s, if it didn’t get you arrested first. It all seemed terribly uncertain.

  Religion was also something of a shock.

  I had come from a world where everyone was white, no one had to pay for anything, and there were no gods. All our books had been rewritten and edited so that we had no idea that this other world existed. We all spoke the same language. Compared to this place, my home was a pale, insipid thing, and I came to hate whoever had condemned my people to that.

  “I have to go to the Trent,” I told Murchison on the morning of my third day at St Kat’s.

  “The River Trent, aye?” Murchison asked.

  “Yes. I left my boat there.”

  “You’ve got a boat, have you, Rupert old son?” he said. “What is it? Speedboat? Cabin cruiser? Got yourself a dolly-bird on board, have you?” A large portion of Murchison’s day seemed to be dedicated to thinking about dolly-birds. When he wasn’t thinking about drinking.

  “It’s a canoe,” I said. “A kayak.”

  “Kayak?” He nodded sagely. “One of they In-u-it thingys, then.”

  “Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t the first idea what he was talking about. “Can you tell me how to get to the Trent?”

  “Ach,” he said, “I’ll go with you. I’m not doing anything important this morning.”

  Together, we walked into the centre of town, and then out again, Murchison happily swigging from his breakfast tin of beer and chattering about
whatever came into his mind. It was a drizzly morning. At one point, I said, “Where can I buy a gun?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “A gun, is it? What kind of a gun?”

  I remembered something Araminta had said. “A semiautomatic rifle,” I told him.

  Give him his due, Murchison gave it serious consideration. “You could always try one of they gangs over in West Bridgford,” he said. “They’re always shooting at each other. Wouldn’t be cheap, though. If you had enough money to buy a gun, they’d be more likely to shoot you with it and take the money.”

  “How much?”

  He thought about it again. “Well, my mate Sam, he had a mate who got himself a pistol. Glock, nine millimetre. Cost him about thirty quid, but it was a piece of crap. Blew up when he tried to use it. Lost his hand.”

  I wondered if there was anything on the Campus that someone here would pay for. We needed weapons if we were going to do anything at all about the Science Faculty, and I’d read enough now to agree with Araminta. Bolt-action rifles and revolvers just weren’t going to be enough.

  We walked through the housing estate that I had first seen when I came off the river, and then across the scrubby playing fields behind it until we came to the Trent. We walked up and down for a while until I spotted the place where the bank had collapsed. I led Murchison to the place where I had hidden the canoe, but of course someone had stolen it.

  BACK AT ST Kat’s, Murchison didn’t seem too disappointed with his day. He’d had a nice walk, drunk a couple of tins of beer, and on the way back he had found not only a £10 coin but half a packet of cigarettes lying on the pavement, which in his world was roughly equivalent to discovering the treasure of an ancient Pharaoh.

  I went back to the room I shared with Murchison and two other men, and I sat on my mattress and tried to think. The department store had been converted into a hostel by sub-dividing up each floor with flimsy wooden partitions. It was, Murchison told me, just one dropped cigarette end away from being an inferno. He said there had once been fire extinguishers in every room, but they had been removed when it turned out some of the residents were taking them down to a nearby shop and exchanging them for bottles of Scotch. The shopkeeper had then sold the extinguishers to local schools and restaurants for five or six times the price of the alcohol and everyone had been happy.