Bar None

by Tim Lebbon

  Jessica and Cordell order drinks, we select some food, and the barman says he will bring it out to us. He assumes we are going back outside.

  Michael is waiting for us, his glass now almost empty.

  "Can I get you a refill?" I ask.

  He shakes his head. "I think you'll all be listening, and I'll be talking, so perhaps after we're done. But thanks."

  We sit down, and within minutes the barman appears with our food. It must have been ready on the plate for him to have brought it so quickly. I sniff my steak and ale pie suspiciously, but when I cut into it, watch the gravy ooze, feel the springy welcome of a mushroom beneath my knife, inhale the aroma. ..I know it will be heavenly.

  "Heavenly," I say, and I begin to eat.

  "Not quite," Michael says. "But let me explain. Then I'll let you all decide."

  "I suspect you're wondering about the view. It's real, or as real as can be. It's the world as it will be when it's moved on. As it is now it's . . . clumsy. And sometimes messy. I think you saw that on the way here, and met some of the mess outside the grounds of Bar None. That's only temporary. It's a confusion of things, but they'll work themselves out."

  "Into that?" I ask, pointing out beyond the wall.

  "Into that."

  Hungry as I am, I put down my fork and stare beyond the stone wall again. I have seen many images on TV and in books of how prehistory might have looked. Towering trees, exotic undergrowth, palms and ferns the size of a jetliner's wing, vines as thick as a man's leg, flowers blooming in innocent splendour and cacti the likes of which few could imagine. But these had only been images, painted or computer-generated. They had never been the real thing. This time I can really see, and hear the swish of a breeze through the high canopy, and smell the freshness of plants untouched by pollution and unsullied by humankind's thoughts of arrangement. I am looking at true, unimagined wilderness.

  There are no birds or other animals. Perhaps they will come later.

  "If it's not really there, how come we're seeing it?" Cordell asks.

  "Because you need to. It'll help you to decide."

  "Decide what?" Jessica asks, but I think we all know.

  "Whether to stay or leave."

  I take a swig of beer, close my eyes and sigh. I cut some more pie and eat it, luxuriating in the wonderful tastes and sensations, wishing this meal could last forever. "Well, we've been through so much to get here," I say. "It's not as if we're going to leave now."

  "Maybe," Michael says. "But you have time. A day and a night, spent here at Bar None. After then, the decision is yours."

  "You make it sound like a trial," Jessica says.

  "Trial period, maybe. But there's no prosecution, no defence. It's all up to you."

  "Who are those other people inside?"

  "More survivors."

  "They've all decided?"

  "Yes, all of them."

  "No one decided to leave?"

  Michael frowns. "To tell the truth, I can't remember. But I don't think so."

  I finish my pie, glance around and then smile as I pick up the plate to lick it clean. Jessica and Cordell are equally enthused about their meals, and similarly keen to finish every scrap. I sit back on the bench and nurse the pint glass in my hand. It is half empty, or half full. Perhaps that was what Michael means when he says that we have to decide. If the glass is half empty then I will go out into this burgeoning new world, take my chances in the wilds. If it is half full then I will stay here, where food and drink were plentiful, and where . . .

  "What do you want us to do?" I ask. "You know so much, you brought us here, but why? What do you want from us?"

  "That's for you to decide. But first, another drink."

  Michael stands and collects our glasses, takes them inside and leaves us out in the garden. The three of us are silent for a while, staring at the world beyond the low stone wall, trying to see where the Range Rover had come to rest but unable to make out anything manmade. I wonder whether it is even still there. If I cross back over that wall where will I be, and when? Will I enter the world I see now, or the one we left only half an hour before? So many questions that I cannot answer, and I suddenly feel vulnerable, unable to dictate my own fate and controlled so much by Michael. I am no longer even sure that he is a man.

  "I have no idea what to do," Jessica says. I have never heard her sounding so weak and defeated. "I'm scared to stay, but even more frightened about leaving. We saw what it was like out there, and that . . ." She points at the wall, and the cliff of alien vegetation beyond. "That's nowhere to be."

  Michael returns with a tray of fresh drinks. He sits beside me, with Jessica and Cordell on the bench opposite us, all four looking out across the well-kept pub garden to the stone wall and beyond.

  "Bar None," I say. "You were going to tell us."

  "I was," Michael says, and for an instant I am afraid that he has changed his mind.

  But then he takes a long drink and smacks his lips, and I hear him whisper under his breath, "So, this is the last of them."

  "The last of us?"

  Jessica and Cordell look over. They hadn't heard Michael say that, only me.

  "But what about those in there?" Jessica says. "And there must be other places like this, places where things are normal."

  "Normal?" Michael runs his hand through his hair. "There is no normal. No middle ground. There can't be when there's such divergence, such deviation. Everyone is so different, no two people are the same, so how can there be normal?"

  "Normal as in what we know," Cordell says.

  "And what do you know? Very little. You've come this far for me, and I thank you for that. But can you explain your journey? Can you tell me what happened, and how, and why?"

  I think of Jacqueline dying in the night and the Irishman (Danny, his name was Danny), those things in and above Newport, and being shot at by people who also had the attributes of plants.

  "So where are we?" I ask.

  "The last bar on Earth." Michael turns and raises his glass at the building behind us. "Yes, the last bar. The last place to get a good drink. Last place to sit before an open fire and talk about old times as if they really matter. And that's important, because they do. Old times matter so much. They're the geography of the present. They mark it and make it, setting out parameters and allowing certain things to be, and other things not to be."

  "The past?"

  "History. It's a living thing, and it needs to remain so. But there are factions that desire that this is not the case."

  "You told us that before," I say. "So who are these factions?"

  Michael looks at me, and I know instantly that I can never understand. "Groups. Belief systems. Gods of potential. They see history as something to be rid of, while others—me included—believe that it will always provide the foundation of the future."

  "What about the present?" Cordell asks.

  "That no longer exists. There's so much to either side of it—the rich past, the endless future—that this present is losing clarity and significance."

  "So why are we here?" Jessica asks. "If certain factions don't want this place to be here, why are we here?"

  "To protect the past," Michael says, "while you yourselves are protected."

  We fall silent, trying to digest and understand but knowing that we probably never will. Time is becoming strange, and already I am sleepy, ready to dream and remember so much more of Ashley.

  The two of us sat in the middle of a forest, drinking Reverend James from a bottle, me watching as she undid the buttons of her blouse with a sly smile on her lips . . .

  Observing through the crack between door and frame as Ashley wasted another pregnancy test kit, negative, negative, and feeling ashamed at seeing tears meant only for herself . . .

  Sat on the river boat with a hundred other tourists, the city of York flowing by as the silence built terribly between us, turning from a lack of anything to say to something too solid to ever breach again . . .


  "Dreaming?" Michael says, and I snap out of it.

  "Just tired."

  "Then go to sleep. You each have a room. And in the morning we can talk some more."

  "I have so many questions," Cordell says. "I don't think I can sleep, and I'm not sure I trust this place."

  "In the morning you'll have fewer questions. I promise." Michael stands to leave.

  "Wait!" I say.

  "The morning."

  "Where are you going?" Jessica asks.

  Michael has started walking across the grass toward the stone wall. He turns back and looks at all three of us, touching us individually. "Guard duty."

  We finish our drinks and go back inside. There are still people scattered around the bar but I don't recognise any of them, as though they have all changed positions since I was last in here an hour before. The barman is there, cheery and round, and he does his best to set us at ease.

  "Your rooms?" he asks.

  I'm going to shake my head, demand answers, but tiredness flushes through me again and I nod.

  "There's hot running water, tea and coffee, fluffy towels and fresh beds."

  "No Sky TV?" Cordell asks.

  "Forgot to renew our licence." He gestures around the side of the bar and I see a door there, opening onto a narrow staircase that climbs around a sharp curve.

  "Which rooms are ours?" I ask.

  "You'll know." He nods, then turns to serve another customer.

  "'We'll know,'" Jessica mimics quietly. "He's about as fucking enigmatic as Michael."

  But he's right. When we reach the top of the narrow staircase the corridor opens out before us, heading in two directions and disappearing into an impossible distance. The carpet is thick but faded, the walls textured with bare painted plaster that looks as though it's half a millennium old. There are doors at regular intervals, bare wood polished by centuries of pushing hands, brass ironmongery equally shined. How many thousands of hands have connected with these handles, skin smeared with the remnants of a meal, or blood, or the sweat from a lover's thighs? Oddly, I decide, perhaps not many. Because although this place looks old, it feels new. It feels . . . unwalked. Most of the lights work, though a few are out, and picture frames containing nothing hang at random intervals. Bare wall. Not even any backing. It's as if the frames are presenting splinters of Bar None for our perusal.

  More corridors lead left and right, and there are more staircases heading up and down. We climb one because it feels right and we're in another corridor, doors every dozen paces, all of them closed. I hear murmurs, whispers and an occasional cry.

  "Bad dreams?" Jessica says.

  "Maybe."

  "The building isn't anywhere near this big," Cordell says.

  "I'm so tired. I'm too tired to care. I just want to sleep." We walk on and then I see my room. The other two seem unconcerned when I open a door and step away from them, but it is so obviously my room that I can't do anything else. I have never been here before—I don't recognise the bed, the room's layout, the black oak beams piercing the ceiling or the patterned bedspread—but it welcomes me in, and I relax on the bed with absolutely no feelings of being displaced. On a table beside the bed rests a fresh pint of Reverend James. I sip.

  Will I ever see Jessica and Cordell again? I think.

  There's an en-suite bathroom, and for a few seconds I expect Ashley to open the door and emerge, smiling, welcoming me into my own private Heaven. But I check out the bathroom and return to the bed alone. As I slip away, I know that this place is nowhere close to paradise.

  Ten: Rebellion

  And there we were, sitting in the Mad Bear and Bishop on Paddington train station, me nursing a pint of Redruth Cornish Rebellion—orange and brown, good head, but with a stale tea aftertaste—and Ashley working her way through an expensive bottle of cheap red wine. I'd already finished one pint, but the pleasant alcohol fuzz was doing little to calm my nerves.

  We had just taken the most momentous decision of our lives.

  "Do you hate me?" Ashley asked.

  "No, of course not." I wished I could make her believe, communicate with her mind-to-mind instead of only with words.

  "You must hate me." She drained her glass and sighed, wiping her hand across the back of her mouth. It was a noisy pub—train announcements, chatting commuters, business people prattling into mobile phones—but I heard the sound her hand made across her lips. Her lips were already stained a dark violet from the wine, and I imagined kissing them. But now was not the time.

  "I don't," I said. "Not in the slightest. I love you more because you can make a decision like that."

  "But it should be our decision."

  "It is!"

  "But you said you wanted it so much."

  I reached out and held her hand, pulling it across the table toward me. I hated the resistance I felt there, even though I knew it was because she was so unsure.

  "And so did you," I said. "But sometimes it's not meant to be."

  We had been to Harley Street to see a fertility specialist. She had revealed that no matter what we tried—fertility treatment, IVF—we would never have children. I can't adopt, Ashley had said as soon as we left the clinic, and it was the sudden, certain answer to a question we had both been musing upon for over a year.

  I would have adopted. No question. But Ashley had made up her mind, and I loved her so much that I had no trouble respecting that.

  "So it's just you and me," she said. She started crying, leaning in close so that she did not have to raise her voice. "Just you and me always, the two of us on holiday. No kids running around and getting lost and jumping in the pool. No screaming babies to wake us in the night. Nothing like that. No first day at school, no swimming certificates, no first words, no first smiles, no teenager problems. We'll never see our children marry. We'll never . . ." She sobbed, a violent cough that shook her shoulders and released a flood of tears. She could hardly speak to finish her sentence, but she had to. "We'll never . . . have . . . grandchildren."

  I cried too, because I was not ashamed. A few heads turned but looked away again, allowing us the privacy of a crowd. Nobody asked us what was wrong because nobody really cared. Everyone here was going somewhere else—home to their partners and children, or home from their lovers—and the crying couple would soon be forgotten by everyone but ourselves.

  We held each other close until the time came for us to board our train. I picked up Ashley's wine bottle as we left, bundled together as if to protect each other from the outside. The physical contact continued as we walked downstairs and out onto the platform, checked our tickets, boarded the train. Even as we sat down we held hands, desperate not to let each other go because we were all we had left.

  "More wine," Ashley whispered into my ear. She smiled and kissed my neck. We drank from the bottle, and when a businessman across the aisle cast a disapproving look I smiled and raised the bottle to him. Ashley giggled.

  We pulled out of the station and lost ourselves amid the sparkling London evening. A few minutes into the journey the wine bottle was empty, and Ashley relinquished physical contact to buy some more from the buffet cart.

  "Don't be long," I said. I watched her sway her way along the carriage, disappearing through the sliding doors.

  The businessman made some vague noise of disapproval and rustled his newspaper. At first I ignored him, but then his air of superiority began to rankle. I stared at him until he glanced up, met my eyes, looked away.

  "Problem?" I asked.

  He shook his head, obviously perturbed that the subject of his disapproval had decided to answer back.

  "Really, I'm not causing trouble, but what's your problem with my wife and I sharing a drink?"

  He looked up again, put down his paper. "No real problem," he said. He had an expensive haircut and manicured nails. He still had his suit jacket on, even though the train was warm. I hated him.

  "It didn't sound like that," I said. "Please, just keep your grunts and sniff
s to yourself."

  He picked up his paper again, dismissing me. "Well, it's no good example for kids, is it?"

  I looked up and down the train. "I can't see any kids," I said. "And what do you know? What do you know about kids, and how they'd look at me, and what they'd see?"

  He looked up again. "I have two of my own." And it was his tone—slow, each word enunciated as though he were talking to a dog—that really struck home with me.

  "Well, you're lucky!" I said. "You're lucky you have two. We have none!" There was so much more to say, but I bit my lip and leaned back in the seat, turning my head so that I was looking from the window. Even then I could see the businessman's reflection. I was pleased to see that he'd lifted the paper to hide himself away entirely. I have two of my own, he'd said, as though he were superior, his kids more deserving of the air we were breathing than me. I have two of my own.

  I cried, and when Ashley returned she sat beside me, opened the wine, and I never mentioned that man and our conversation to her, ever. We drank that bottle and I went to buy another. When I returned I looked for signs that Ashley and the man had been talking, but he seemed to have nodded off in his seat, and my beautiful wife was staring from the window as I had been earlier.

  Drunk, emotional, so in love, we both laughed when the businessman shook himself awake to discover that he had missed his stop. At first he cursed, but then he smiled and laughed with us, and I felt a crippling weight of bitterness lift away from me before it had ever truly landed.

  I wake in the middle of the night to hear someone screaming. For a second or two I'm disorientated; am I at home, in the mansion, at Bar None? Then I jump from the bed and stand motionless in the middle of my room, breathing lightly so as not to mask any sounds. The screaming has stopped, but I think I can hear sobbing coming from far away. It's not a pleasant sound, but I am unsure of it: maybe it's only the plumbing coming to life.

  I feel the wetness of tears on my cheeks. My eyes are sore. I want to dream of Ashley again and again, but there was something about that last dream that felt so final. The closure of a life. And, perhaps, my acceptance of her death.