I didn’t know what to do.
I was struggling to keep my thoughts straight and everything was getting mixed up. I would burst into tears and then be unsure if I was crying for James, my parents, me or a combination of all three. My dreams were haunted by images of dead family members, hospital waiting rooms, and giant piles of burning bodies.
I hadn’t been able to bear staying at my parents’ and didn’t want to go back to my flat.
I had other people that I cared about that I should have checked up on, but I didn’t really want to spend my last days alive on a macabre tour of ‘dead people I used to know and love’. Plus the idea of going to see James’s sister and her two kids made me burst into tears all over again.
I knew I had to try to find other people who weren’t yet sick, so I had driven the Range Rover (slowly) to the local police station, council offices, even the RAF barracks near to my parents’. They were all closed and empty.
I’d then driven back to London but hadn’t wanted to go back to the flat, so I’d spent a miserable night parked on a random street, sleeping in the Range Rover. The back seat was surprisingly roomy and comfy but, despite my coat and the single duvet I had brought with me, I almost froze.
In a last-ditch attempt to find someone or raise some kind or reaction I drove through the deserted streets of London beeping my horn.
Every so often I would see more black plumes of smoke rising into the sky but, now that I knew what was causing those plumes, I gave them a very wide berth.
Finally, I stood outside the front gates of Buckingham Palace and yelled and screamed and waved my arms and beeped the car horn and played the radio as loud as it would go and generally made the biggest scene I could.
Nothing.
The blank face of the building stayed blank. There was no twitch of curtains, no movement of the security cameras, no face peering out from the shadows, no figure darting across the courtyard. It was still and silent.
Everywhere was still and silent.
I didn’t see anything alive. Even the pigeons and birds were gone. London was deserted.
I say that I didn’t see anyone, but that is a lie.
I did see people. I saw hundreds of people. People standing behind curtains, around corners, in shop windows. Hundreds of times I saw them, hundreds of times my heart would jump into my mouth, I would screech the Range Rover to a halt, throw myself out of the car and stumble towards my fellow man to find … no one. Shadows.
Every time it would be a trick of the eye, an awkwardly placed Christmas tree, a shop mannequin grinning at me inanely. One time I pressed my face hopefully to a living-room window to see three pairs of yellow eyes staring back at me. It wasn’t until I spied the corpses in the corner and then the owners of the yellow eyes meowed pitifully that I finally accepted it was not a human I had seen through the curtain.
It was exhausting and depressing, and each time I was painfully reminded of my new solitary status.
Even now I still see people out of the corner of my eye.
It still makes me cry.
I don’t know why I didn’t kill myself at this point. I suppose I still thought that someone else must be out there, that maybe there was some secret bunker filled with scientists, or that the Queen had a deadly-disease panic room she was hidden in. It still seemed too unbelievable that I was the only one left. I hadn’t properly accepted the fact that James and my parents were dead yet, so I definitely wasn’t ready to accept the idea that everyone else on the planet might have died too.
I tried to think of a good plan to find other survivors, but everything that I came up with sounded ridiculous. Should I just drive endlessly around London beeping the Range Rover horn until I ran out of petrol? What would I do then? Swap the Range Rover for a handcart, get a hand bell, and roam the streets ringing and yelling ‘Bring out your non-dead’?
I chewed on my stale bread and felt a tear roll down my cheek once more.
It was hopeless.
I was hopeless.
And then I stopped.
It wasn’t just hopeless, it was also ridiculous.
If I was the last one left alive in a land of plenty, why was I sitting in the cold, eating stale bread?
I should at least have been sitting in the cold, eating stale bread while drunk on the finest champagne in the land.
And that was when I realised what I needed to do.
I needed to take a tip from one of the Hollywood movies my mum loved so much.
For her thirteenth birthday present my grandma took my mum to see her first ‘adult’ movie at the cinema. It was Doctor Zhivago. At over three hours long and set in a world she had no knowledge of it should have bored my newly teenage mum.
It didn’t.
My mum lost herself in the film. She was enthralled by the snowy, foreign world, the costumes and sets, the dancing and music, swept up in the epic romantic love story. She told me that it was a completely visceral experience and when she left the cinema she felt like the world around her was in shades of grey compared to what she had just witnessed. That one celluloid experience shaped the rest of my mum’s life, defining her vision of romantic love and creating a lifelong adoration for romantic Hollywood movies, anything from Casablanca to Sleepless in Seattle. Movies that she felt echoed her own experience of finding true love and the happiness that would bring.
My mum never seemed to notice the sadness and pain that a lot of these movies put their female characters through.
My mum and dad had a Hollywood romance. A genuine fairy-tale love that lasted for fifty years.
They met on my mum’s first day at her summer job, when she was seventeen and my dad was nineteen. They rode the same minibus to work and on that first morning one of the other girls told her to watch out for my dad because he was a charmer but only interested in stealing ciggies.
My mum took up smoking immediately.
My mum applied to and was accepted at the same university as my dad and took the same university degree as him. They married as soon as my mum turned eighteen, and had shared their lives, and every major decision in those lives, ever since. They decided to move away from Sheffield together, decided to become teachers together, decided to keep trying for a baby after my mum’s sixth miscarriage together. If you looked up the words ‘together’, ‘love’ or ‘happy marriage’ in the illustrated dictionary it would, or should, have a picture of my mum and dad next to each of them. They were as in love on the day they died as they were on the day they married.
My mum wanted me to be happy more than anything else in the world. She had experienced unconditional love and true happiness in her life and she wanted that for me. She wanted me to have the same ultimate love story that life had given her: my very own Hollywood movie storyline.
This was very loving and very sweet.
It was also a lot of fucking pressure.
By the age of seventeen I had never had a ‘proper’ boyfriend and never brought anyone home to meet my parents.
So when Xavier Alexander William James-Stuart pulled up to our house one Friday night in his vintage Jaguar I honestly thought my mum might faint.
Xavier Alexander William James-Stuart – Xav – was literally everything my mum could have wanted. He was rich, well-educated, good-looking, charming, funny, kind, generous, and loving.
Of course, he was also gay.
Actually, he hadn’t officially defined himself as gay when he first met my parents. Xav experimented with both men and women until he was about nineteen, but then announced he was gay when we were eating breakfast one day. ‘I don’t like the unpredictability of the juice with women. At least with a man I know roughly when it is going to happen and can prepare for it. And, let’s be honest, with women it’s all quite hard work. Men are a lot easier all round and I am very lazy.’
He really was. Lazy.
Xav’s dad (Rupert) was a distant relative of some minor member of the royal family. Rupert had failed to inherit the grand b
ut crumbling country pile and had, instead, inherited a pile of money. Rupert had then added to this pile by being the top trader at one of the big city banks and working twenty-hour days to increase the fortune of a family line that did, and would always, end with Xav.
Xav had a trust fund and, after his father died, an even bigger trust fund.
Xav didn’t work. Ever.
In the twenty years that I knew him, Xav never had a job, never had a lasting relationship, he didn’t even commit to a contract for his mobile phone. The only people apart from me that he saw regularly were his personal trainer and the family accountant.
People and lovers came in and out of Xav’s life, and he could never be bothered to care.
Except for me. He cared about, looked after, and loved me.
Within a year of meeting we were best friends and, for me, that was enough. I never needed another best friend, or even good friends. I had Xav.
Xav was like the brother that I never had, and we were the family he had always wanted. He came on holidays with us, spent birthdays, Christmas, and Easter at my house, came to Sunday lunch every weekend. My parents loved him.
I loved him.
But, unfortunately, not in the way that my mum thought I was destined to when she opened the door on that gloomy Friday evening to find Xav standing on the doorstep jiggling his car keys.
December 22nd 2023
I wanted to start my new Hollywood dream by getting myself an extremely expensive hotel suite but, like many other things in this new world, it wasn’t as easy or straightforward as I had hoped it would be.
Some hotels had had the audacity to actually close as soon as 6DM reached us and I wasn’t yet brave enough to smash my way into anywhere that was locked, so they were off my list. Some of the smaller hotels that had stayed open until the very end had a smell that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, identify, so they too were out of contention. For the ones that were left I soon discovered that most hotels have a key card system for their doors these days, which are programmed by computers that I had no idea how to use, and therefore the wonders that lay inside these doors were destined never again to be viewed by human eyes.
I spent a fruitless, cold, depressing day driving around London unable to stay in any of the hotels I stopped at for one reason or another.
Then I tried the Langham.
My God, it is a beautiful hotel. The front doors were closed but not locked, no one was in reception, everything was spotless, if a little dusty. The lobby and reception area had huge high ceilings, marble floors, and giant bouquets of fresh flowers only just starting to wilt. The dining rooms with their massive windows, plush furnishings, and grand pianos were just waiting for humans to return and take afternoon tea in them. The sun chose this moment to come out and the glorious way it lit the entire ground floor with a dusky light made the beauty of the building soar. My heart lifted for the first time since James had become ill, and I knew that I would stay here even if I couldn’t get in the bedrooms. I would sleep in reception if I had to.
But I could get into the bedrooms. Through luck, human error, or system failure the doors to all the rooms were unlocked.
I had my pick.
I looked in at them all. Two-bedroom suites, four-bedroom suites, even one with six bedrooms. They had sitting rooms and dressing rooms and luggage rooms and cinema rooms and kitchens and pantries and TVs as big as cinema screens, bathrooms the size of our flat, beds the size of our bedroom. It was like nothing I had ever seen. I ran from room to room, marvelling at the beauty and extravagance, my dire situation and painful loneliness momentarily forgotten when presented with such opulent glory.
At one point I stopped to have a bath simply because it was the most humongous bath I had ever seen, and because the hot water was miraculously still working. I relived my childhood and mixed up the most extravagant concoction from all the lotions and potions I could find, producing four foot of bubbles when I poured it under the running water.
In the end I settled for staying in a one-bedroomed suite with a separate lounge and massive wrap-around terrace filled with flowering winter blooms, that overlooked Regent Street. I walked around the suite pretending that I was just on an expensive weekend away in an amazing hotel rather than alone in a city full of dead people.
For the first but definitely not last time I turned to exclaim to James about the beauty of the room, how lucky we were to stay there.
There was no James.
I needed a drink.
I went down to their bar, Artesian. It was exquisite, empty, and set as if waiting for my arrival. Sunshine flooded in through the windows and bounced off the ornate bar and row upon row of expensive bottles of booze. Massive vases of flowers adorned marble plinths and filled the place with the light perfume of a spring that was still months away. Small tables and chairs along with larger leather sofas and banquettes were ready and waiting for a clientele that would never visit again.
I looked at the bar menu, which told me that the Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle was the most expensive champagne available, but I like rosé champagne, so I settled for the Dumangin Brut Rosé. The fridges were still working so it was icy cold. I popped the top in a way that would have made the sommelier wince, poured it with a complete lack of grace, and then downed the first glass in one. I had immediate brain freeze, but it was still delicious.
I drank the rest of the bottle.
I moved from the bar, to a sofa, to a window seat, and then sat at the back of the room and just admired the view. After one bottle of champagne I was feeling happy and light and the lack of anyone to enjoy the champagne with bothered me much less than it had before.
I spent the early evening hours on the outside terrace of my room wrapped in not one but two fluffy dressing gowns, swigging a second bottle of champagne straight from the neck and staring down at Regent Street.
It was deserted.
Not just deserted of people but of everything. No people, no cars, no buses, no tourists, no roadside kiosks selling overpriced fruit from silver bowls, not even a stray cat or dog.
I could no longer hear the distant rumble of the underground, the faint chime of piped music from shops, or the hum of a car from far away. The sky was devoid of planes and helicopters, and even the birds seemed to have taken the evening off.
I was completely and utterly alone in my fancy hotel room and in my street and, in all likelihood, the entirety of London.
I didn’t want to think about that.
I downed the rest of the bottle, went back into my suite, and flung myself on to the bed.
I had just enough time to think that it was like sleeping on a soft, wonderful cloud before I passed out.
My head was banging the next morning and I scrabbled in my bag for some sort of painkiller. I lay in bed and reflexively checked my phone for Facebook or Instagram updates. There were none. The panicked post that I had written about still being alive on the night after James had died was top of both feeds.
I staggered up from the bed, clutched my pounding head, and waited for the paracetamol to kick in.
It is surprising how much luxury and opulence can soothe pain. I stood under the seven-jetted shower for an extraordinarily long time and then slathered myself in the expensive toiletries that were kindly provided, before drying my hair with a hairdryer that cost more than my TV (my hair had never looked so shiny). By the time I was dressed in clean clothes from my suitcase, spritzed with perfume, and had put a bit of mascara on I felt semi-normal.
And starving. Completely and utterly starving.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten properly and was not about to go and get the stale bread from the Range Rover. So down into the bowels of the hotel and into the kitchen I went.
The visit wasn’t as productive as I hoped. What I wanted was to walk in, open a fridge or cupboard, and find shelf upon shelf of delicious pre-made delicacies and delights that would tantalise and tempt my taste buds. But, it turns out, posh
hotel kitchens do not pre-make food in batches ready to then be microwaved as and when necessary. Instead, they have fridges and cupboards full of raw ingredients from which their incredibly talented chefs can create fresh masterpieces to order. James did most of the cooking in our house. I can tell an avocado from a passion fruit, but I probably couldn’t use either of them in a recipe.
There wasn’t even any pre-made bread.
I looked around the huge kitchen to see if there was anything I could use to cook the ingredients. I could recognise the toaster and microwave, but everything else looked like it was designed for someone with a culinary degree, not me. I couldn’t even find a kettle.
Eventually I ate some fancy cheese with no crackers, some nuts that I got from Artesian, a huge chunk of black forest ham that was probably £40 a slice, and a selection of berries that I drowned in some cream that was just about in date. It was very tasty but not the cordon bleu creation I had been hoping for.
I knew I would have to go out and get some food from somewhere, but I just didn’t feel ready, or desperate enough. I wasn’t as brave or well organised as James. I wouldn’t know which shop was the best one to go to, definitely wouldn’t be able to break into one if it was closed, and I wouldn’t know what to get anyway.
No. I decided it was best to stay in the luxurious sanctuary of the Langham for now. I had plenty of bar snacks, cheese, ham, and berries – that was almost representative of the four food groups, so good enough for me.
I went back to my room and barely moved for the next three days.
I didn’t leave the hotel, and only left my room to get food and more booze and magazines.
I discovered if I maintained a mild state of drunkenness – just barely tipsy, not head-swimming levels – I could mostly stop myself from dwelling on my lonely and frightening situation. As long as I kept busy.
Last One at the Party Page 7
