You only have to read the comments to see where that experiment led.
The only reason we managed to crawl to where we were before those asteroids fell was blind luck and the hard work of individuals. Geniuses and visionaries, artists and scientists, independent minds in labs and garrets – they’re the ones who made the difference to history. Not the governments. Not the companies. And certainly not the crowds.
This particular crowd was ready to become a mob.
‘Silence!’ yelled Ulrich, his voice catapulting a register or two. The blood that had suddenly rushed to fill his face abated with the crowd’s murmurs. ‘There is no virus. Mr Bryce Gower has undergone a thorough physical examination, and our medical team have determined that he is not a carrier.’
‘Then why is my wife—?’
‘As for the vomiting and diarrhoea affecting some of your fellow passengers, this, I am afraid, is due to a bout of food poisoning.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The clams, as I understand it.’
‘Bloody disgrace,’ mumbled a voice, which had to be Gerald’s.
‘This is regrettable, but you are in no immediate danger. However—’
‘Why are we drifting west?’ It was Richard’s voice. ‘And where is our fleet?’
A cold silence gripped the deck. Ulrich turned in his direction. ‘As I was about to say, we have more pressing matters to attend to. South Africa is no longer our destination. Please –’ he held out his palms once again to the triggered crowd ‘– let me continue. According to our communication channels, Cape Town is no longer safe.’
‘Why?’ The question echoed from larynx to larynx.
‘We do not have details, only that it has been … overrun.’
Alice shot me a look, fingers at her mouth. ‘Mummy? What about Daddy?’
I pulled her close, stunned by her understanding, and tightened my grip on Arthur. ‘It’s OK, darling, Daddy will know.’
She nodded, satisfied, still pulling at her lips. How easy it is to lie to your children.
‘Then where the hell are we going?’ said Richard.
‘Across the Atlantic to what was once Florida. We have word that a safe haven has opened up near Daytona Beach, an archipelago with plenty of room and supplies.’ Ulrich scanned the crowd with a hopeful smile. ‘This actually makes our route shorter by some margin, and we should arrive in less than fifteen days. Until then, please try to enjoy the journey, if you can.’
‘Enjoy?’ said Gerald. ‘How can we enjoy it? There’s bugger all to do apart from read second-rate paperbacks.’ He held up the one he had been reading. ‘This one’s falling to bits, and it’s missing the last ruddy page!’
I felt Mary bristle next to me. ‘It’s not a sodding cruise ship, you miserable twat. It’s an evacuation. You’re lucky to be alive.’
Gerald slowly turned his head in our direction. He narrowed his eyes. ‘Lucky to be alive. Yes, you’d know all about that wouldn’t you, Mary.’
They glared at each other for a few seconds before Ulrich raised those placating palms of his once more.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘there is no need to argue, and I know how tedious long voyages can be. Take it from someone with experience!’ He laughed, but it was just him, and it soon disappeared. He cleared his throat in the silence. ‘The crew are already working on some entertainment for you. We will update you in due course. Thank you for your time.’
‘Hear that, Alice?’ I said as the crowd dispersed. ‘We’re going to Florida. That’s where Disneyland is. Maybe you’ll see a princess.’
‘She told you, Mummy,’ said Mary. ‘She’s a pirate, not a princess, isn’t that right, Ally-bally?’
Alice grinned back at her, then threw me a firm salute.
‘Sorry, darling, I’m sure there are pirates there too.’
Gerald passed, shooting Mary a look. She stretched her most painful smile back.
‘What was all that about back there?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t have the foggiest. He just doesn’t like me.’ She smiled and raised her eyebrows. ‘Can’t all be friends, can we?’
‘Miss, er, Beth?’
I turned to see the captain standing behind me, hands behind his back.
‘Yes?’
He gave me a weak smile.
‘You mentioned to me that you had some experience with computers.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, some of our crew have also been incapacitated by the food poisoning, including the engineer who was working on the diagnostics system. I was wondering if you would mind taking a look?’
‘Oh.’ I flushed. ‘Of course, I’d be happy to. Er, when do you want me to start?’
He shrugged. ‘Now is as good a time as any, but I’m afraid I cannot allow children into the systems room. It is not safe.’
‘Right, well, I’ll need to find someone to watch—’
Mary had already taken Alice’s hand. She reached for Arthur, giving me a wink as I let him go.
‘Go do your stuff, I’ve got you covered.’
Chapter 6
Do you remember your first kiss? I do. Pete Drever, third year, in a slow spin upon the park roundabout. It was actually quite sweet – not the sweaty, ham-fisted face-gobble I’d heard some other girls describe. Pete and I lived on the same estate, so we’d often walk home through the park together, and that afternoon we found that we were holding hands, and he kissed me. It was a rare and wonderful moment of teenage spontaneity with a successful outcome; our mouths just happening to collide at just the right angle, and with just enough space between the lips to classify it as a fully fledged snog.
Loved Pete for that.
Nothing came of it, though. We stopped at the first door, not going on to explore the other rooms in the dank palace of pubescent sexuality. That would happen much later, at college, with a boy called Jamie. He was nice too, but I knew I was a little – I don’t know – late to the party, so perhaps I was a little eager to get the job done. He seemed upset afterwards. Felt bad for him.
First kiss, first shag, what else? First hair, first period, first drink, first orgasm …
Why are these all the firsts?
Why are these the milestones we’re encouraged to remember? What kind of grizzly photo album is this to carry through your life?
Why not: first genuine joke that made a friend laugh?
Easy: Knock knock. Who’s there? Interrupting doctor. Interrupting doc—You’ve got cancer.
First sunrise witnessed alone.
16 July 1991, day after Granny’s funeral, no sleep, watching blossom drift from the tree in her garden and listening to Grandad’s whisky-soaked sobs downstairs.
First sentence that made your heart stop.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: ‘And her joy was nearly like her sorrow.’
First time you closed a book and felt grief.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
First film that made you openly weep.
Dirty Dancing. Sue me.
Puberty’s full of such magnificent moments; it’s not just fumblings and embarrassments and awkward realisations. After the haze of childhood, we’re finally coming alive, and every feeling’s new and raw. It can be as wonderful as it is terrible, just like the rest of life.
I can still remember the first computer program I wrote. I was fourteen and it was on that knocked-off Amstrad my grandad had won in the pub.
‘It’s a heap o’ shite, Bob,’ yelled my granny from the kitchen. It was sitting on the sideboard, a neat beige cube next to a battered cardboard box. ‘It’s Christmas next week and we’ve precious little space as it is. I want rid o’ it!’
‘Aye, aye, aye,’ my grandad replied, losing himself in his paper. ‘Right enough.’
I peered into that musty box full of mysterious disks, cables and possibilities.
‘Can I borrow it, Grandad?’
He looked at me over his paper.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Course you can, hen. Ti
ll I find someone who’ll buy the bastard.’
It took me the best part of an hour to carry it the four alleyways back to our house, supporting the rapidly perishing box with my knee, gripping wires in my mouth and stopping every ten paces to pick up a wayward disk. I spent all night trying to work that thing, and this is when the closest thing to Google was a monochrome fantasy on films like War Games or D.A.R.Y.L. I listened to the manual, helpfully recorded onto a C-90 cassette by the poor old train spotter from whom it had been – I now imagine – nicked, on my Walkman. I read the three magazines that had come with it, trying to understand this new language of daunting half-words and acronyms like ROM, RAM and CP/M. I typed ‘DIR’ and ‘DATE’ and felt electrified when I was rewarded with a response. And I ran BASIC, told it to print my name on the screen, then told it to do it again forever.
On Christmas Day I got a puzzle in my cracker made from four cubes with coloured faces, which you had to arrange in a row so that not two adjacent faces were the same colour. I grew impatient with it, so I snuck upstairs to sketch out the problem on graph paper. Soon I had a verbose and unwieldy program running to test every one of the 1296 combinations, and three hours later – to my intense delight – the mighty 4MHz processor had spewed out its solution. I proudly announced this downstairs, only to find that my grandad had completed the puzzle in five minutes.
But it didn’t matter. I had done it, and I was hooked.
With the small stack of fivers and sellotaped coins I’d amassed from Christmas cards and the fists of the well-meaning drunks who staggered in and out of the house during the festive period, I bought a brand-new PCW magazine and scoured the catalogue at the back for programming tools on which to spend the rest. I stayed up late learning about functions, procedures and arrays, and becoming mildly terrified by concepts like screen memory and machine code. At the weekend I’d stay up even later, with a stash of Vimto and Wotsits by my desk and Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show on my headphones. I wrote games featuring protagonists made from letters and numbers, who scurried around the screen eating punctuation marks. I built entire worlds from numbers, carved flickering ideas from fat green pixels.
I became lost in it, this little universe that was under my control, in which the worst consequence I faced was a divide-by-zero or (dear God, have mercy upon us) an infinite loop requiring a hard reset and the potential loss of code.
And it wasn’t just a phase. I was still doing this two years later, at an age when the reputation of my city demanded that I spend my evenings swilling MD 20/20 and allowing myself to be fingered against some rusty, rain-soaked railings. I managed to avoid all that, thankfully.
My mother grew worried.
‘You should be out having fun,’ she said, whipping a tea towel over her shoulder. ‘Making friends, a girl of your age. It’s not right that you spend all that time up in your room.’
My dad said nothing. He knew what happened against those railings.
More than anything else I liked the feeling of being alone, and learning that being alone didn’t have to mean being alone with your thoughts.
I directed all mine into the heart of that machine, solving problems the same way people climb mountains. The same way they sail seas.
I would think back to this period of my life when, years later, I attended interviews.
‘And what would you say were your weaknesses, Miss Fenton? Would you say you were a team player?’
Absolutely not. I will only come and work for you if you keep those people away from me. I will require an airtight, lockable room with three forty-one-inch monitors, a top-of-the-range sound system, windows optional. Oh, and an unlimited supply of Jaffa Cakes too, please. In fact you can pay me in Jaffa Cakes; I honestly don’t mind.
‘Oh, totally. Team player, that’s me all right. Human contact, well, it’s like oxygen to me. I’d die without it.’
Listen.
I’m only telling you this because it led to what happened next. And what happened next is extremely hard for me to tell you about. Every night I live with the nightmare of what could have, what didn’t and what did happen because of my actions.
So, what was it exactly that I did?
I retreated into my happy little world, that’s what I did. I went below deck and set myself to the task of fixing Captain Ulrich’s broken diagnostics systems. I spent all day, the next, and the next, down in that windowless room reading manuals, examining installations and poring through source code, just like I had done in my bedroom all those years ago.
They brought me tea and biscuits – not Jaffa Cakes, unfortunately – and in the safety I somehow perceived that great floating hulk of steel and aluminium provided, I broke down the problem and addressed it bit by bit. Bit by bit I fixed their system.
And all the while, Mary Higgs looked after my children in the decks above. She played with them, took them to the toilet, fed them.
Grew close to them.
And I trusted her.
Why wouldn’t I?
In the evenings I would emerge onto the floodlit deck, a little dazed and groggy from twelve hours of work, and find Mary with the children.
‘They’ve been no bother at all,’ she would say. ‘We’ve had fun, haven’t we, Alice? And how are you getting on?’
‘Good,’ I’d reply, mind still chugging through whatever problem I had just left, and eager to return. ‘Almost there, I think.’
Once the kids were asleep in the cabin, I’d stay up enjoying the novelty of a warm evening on board a ship in December. Mary and I would talk until it was time to return to her husband in the cabin. I remember I found the fact that he was still unwell strange, given that almost everyone else had recovered from the stomach upset. But I filed it away with every other little alarm bell that jangled, and forgot about it.
I told you already, throw your stones. I’m the one that has to live with it.
One evening I met Richard and Josh lying on loungers, watching the night sky. Richard sat up as I approached.
‘Join us?’ he said, offering an empty lounger.
‘I was just going to bed.’
He frowned: ‘Just for a bit? Great sky tonight, right Josh?’
His son looked between us, and I had the sense that he had just witnessed his father behave unusually.
‘Hi Josh,’ I said, to fill the silence. ‘How have you been?’
This was not just small talk – I meant: How have you been coping with this business of surviving? Have did you manage to cope for three weeks on your own in a camp, knowing that your mother was dead, and fearing the same for your father?
He looked back at me, clicking two fingernails together. His features were still being manhandled by adolescence, and it was still hard to pick apart the man from the boy. I had a feeling the boy was winning.
‘I’m all right,’ he said.
Richard gave me a glance that told me he wasn’t.
‘New Year’s Eve tomorrow, isn’t that right, Joshy?’
He clapped a palm hard on his son’s shoulder and shook it. It was a display I’d seen countless times before from my father to my brother, from boy to boy after a playground tussle, from PE teacher to the thirteen-year-old prop forward who’s just crawled out from a collapsed scrum – always between males; if my mother had ever done it to me I would have leaped from my skin. The impact was just a little too hard to be comfortable, the rub just a little too aggressive to be fraternal; it was a reminder, barely encrypted in the gloomy cyphers of male communication. Pain must not be shown. Whatever it is you’re feeling, bury it, just like this.
And that’s what Josh did. I saw it in his eyes, somewhere in the middle of his father’s rough jostles he buried it; it broke my heart not to know what it was or why it was not allowed to exist.
But in its place he found a smile, which he turned to me.
‘Yeah, they’re putting on a film up on deck. Kind of like those outside cinema things with deckchairs and that. Are you coming?’
‘I’ll save you a seat,’ said Richard. He turned to Josh. ‘Won’t we, son?’
‘Seat for what?’ I turned at the unmistakable rumble behind me. There stood Bryce, wearing knee-length black shorts and a fresh T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of some Hawaiian sunset. His face was still pale, but the air around him suggested a recent wash.
‘Bryce, you look … better.’
‘Shut up. I know I look like shite.’
‘You’ve got less vomit on you at any rate.’
He grunted. ‘Aye, which is more than can be said for my clothes. They gave me these.’ He looked grimly down at his attire, picking at the fabric that strained at the extremities of bicep, chest and belly. ‘Bit wee, aren’t they?’
‘You look fine. Really, you do.’
He sniffed and held his stomach. ‘I don’t feel it, but there’s nothing else to come up. What’s all this about seats?’
‘There’s a film tomorrow,’ I said, ‘up here on deck.’
‘That right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Josh. ‘Dad said he’d save a seat for Beth.’
Bryce paused in the awkward silence that followed, still grinning behind his beard, and gave Richard and me a look apiece. ‘Did he now? Well, isn’t that nice.’
I sensed it was time to go.
‘I’m off to bed,’ I said. ‘Glad you’re feeling better Bryce. Night.’
I tried to make sure Richard wasn’t the last one my eyes landed on, but something made me glance at him as I left, and it felt as obvious as if I’d just sounded a foghorn.
We have limits, you see, us humans. Life can only throw so much at you before you just tell it where to go, and you find yourself reverting to easy things like finding someone attractive and liking the fact that they seem to feel the same about you.
That and neglecting your children, apparently.
I hurried away, head down, and made for the cabin.
‘Night,’ called Bryce in sing-song. ‘See you tomorrow, if there are any seats left …’
Chapter 7
The End of the World Survivors Club Page 4