ICE DIARIES
by
Lexi Revellian
Published by
HOXTON PRESS
2 Hoxton Street, London N1 2PG
Copyright
©
Lexi Revellian
2012
All rights reserved
While the places in this book are a mixture of real and imagined, the characters and events are fictitious.
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 Tori
2 The stranger
3 You might not want to read this
4 No other business
5 Solar tulips and a Tardis
6 Morgan’s past – or part of it
7 Ceilidh
8 Trails
9 Expect the unexpected
10 Hidden depths
11 Serena
12 Rat to dinner
13 Civilized and reasonable
14 Red
15 Dig two graves
16 Decisions
17 Interlude
18 Visitor
19 Shopping with Semtex
20 Saying goodbye
21 News of Mike
22 Fire
23 The problem with guns…
24 Trip to the chemist
25 Strata
26 Ginger
27 Biscuit under the sofa
28 Killers
29 Meeting the press
30 Goodbye to Strata
31 Toby’s christening
Epilogue
Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian
Prologue
Morgan put one foot in front of the other, the snow crunching beneath his boots. One step at a time and he’d get there. A full moon shone blue and white on the undulating surface. Less than a mile away, City of London skyscrapers emerged from twenty metres of snow like the tombstones of a dead civilization. From a few of the nearer buildings thin smoke trailed through the clean air towards myriad stars glittering coldly above. He did not notice the beauty of the night; he had other preoccupations. Unless he reached the source of one of those wisps of smoke he would die.
Not far now, he could make it. The gash on his ribs gaped with every gasping breath, blood seeping. He battled pain, cold, thirst and exhaustion as if they were a tough opponent in the cage; keep fighting however much punishment you take, don’t admit the possibility of tapping out.
The weight of his backpack dragged him down. Its contents were no good to him any more. He shrugged the thing off and let it thump to the ground without a backward glance, staggered on for fifty metres then fell to his knees and began to crawl.
Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian
CHAPTER 1
Tori
Monday, 30th April 2018 (Nina maintains I have got a day ahead so it’s Sunday 29th, but she is wrong).
Today no snow fell, the first time for months, and the sun shone in a brilliant blue sky. With luck there’ll be icicles, so much easier to melt than snow. Greg called, as he does most days, doing his rounds. He banged on the window, slid open the patio door and came in. I gave him a Mars bar. I once joked he runs a protection racket – we all got into the habit of giving him stuff when he arrived, because he seemed so helpless – and he took up the idea, though he interprets it his own way. He likes to think he protects us, checking up on our small community each day, carrying messages and doing a bit of trading. He put his bag on the kitchen counter and his gloves to warm over my wood-burning stove while he ate the Mars bar. The snow melted off his boots and pooled on the stone-effect tiles. I peered into the open top of his bag.
“What’s that you’ve got there, Greg?” He took out an A4 notebook, black with a scarlet spine, and handed it to me. I opened it. Crisp off-white pages, with faint blue lines and a margin at the top. I had a sudden fancy to start a diary. I made him an offer. “A tin of sardines?”
Greg concentrated, his big moon face serious. He’s got the hang of bartering now, and enjoys it. “It’s new almost, nothing written in it. There was only some numbers on the first page, and I tore them out. You’d never know. Two tins?”
“Hey, what about the Mars bar?”
“That’s for protection.”
“Okay. One tin of sardines and a bar of soap. Imperial Leather.” I’d come across eight bars the week before when I was working on my own, a lucky find.
“Soap?” He didn’t sound keen.
“Time you had a wash, Greg, you’re beginning to hum. Come round this evening and I’ll heat you up some water. I’ll lend you a towel. Can’t say fairer than that.”
He made up his mind. “Done.”
I fetched the sardines and soap and gave them to him. He held out his hand and we shook on the deal, in Greg’s view an essential part of the transaction. He turned to go, then thought of something.
“Paul says can you come over, because he thinks the baby’s nearly coming.”
Paul and Claire live not far from my place, in Shakespeare Tower in the Barbican, though in a blizzard it can take half an hour to get there from my flat. Bézier, where I live, is a lavish new block with a bulging glass façade like two half barrels, erstwhile home to rich City bankers. It overlooks Old Street roundabout – not that the roundabout is visible any more – but my flat is on the opposite side, facing south towards the City. The snow is so deep you can’t see the street layouts, just the tops of the taller buildings, virtually all modern architecture. Most Victorian buildings are covered, apart from the odd church steeple or decorative tower (near me is a guy standing on a globe shading his eyes – he looks rather surprised). St Leonard’s lightning conductor sticks up, with a bit of the spire below, the sort of feature that would make travelling on a sledge with a windkite hazardous. If I had a sledge … Even the tallest trees are buried now. You can see clusters of City skyscrapers and cranes in the distance, and to the south east as far as Canary Wharf where the light no longer pulses to warn off aircraft. There are no aircraft. The London Eye is silhouetted on the horizon to the south west like the wheel of a giant’s bike; turn to the west, and the BT Tower looms, a high-tech totem pole.
Smoke trails rising from our fires are visible in the clear air. Similar threads in the far distance show we are not the only little group surviving in London. Sometimes I climb to the rooftop of Bézier and stare out at them, wondering who they are and how they are managing. Pretty much like us, I suppose. Snow laps the bottom of the balcony that runs outside my flat (I’m on the tenth floor) and I worry that next year I’ll have to move all my supplies to a higher apartment, which would be a lot of work, though the others would help.
I set off through the white landscape, so bright in the sunlight I put on my dark glasses. Complete silence; no birds, no cars, no people. Just the sound of my boots and the squeak of the snow. Perhaps I can persuade everyone we should target a sports shop and get us all pairs of cross-country skis …
I dropped on to the terrace on the ninth floor, went down the emergency stairs and up three flights. Unlike the rest of us, Paul and Claire made the decision to pick a flat well above the snow, on the assumption the level was likely to rise. This means a lot more lugging of stores and firewood on a daily basis; I think it’s easier to move up a storey when you have to. I can’t lock my flat, but this no longer matters. I knocked on their door. Paul let me in, looking harassed. The room felt hot after the cold outside and I hastened to take my coat off. The flats don’t have fireplaces any more than mine does, but Paul’s fixed up a Victorian range with the flue going out through a hole in the wall. He made the hole painstakingly with a cold chisel and hammer. He’s an architect, but not good with his hands. As a group, we’re over-educated and lacking practical skills, which matters more than it used to. Gemma stood behind him and smiled up at me, looking a
little lost.
“Hi Gemma.” I got out a toy pony I’d been saving for this occasion and held it towards her. She let go of her father and took it. “This is for your collection.”
“What do you say, Gemma?” Paul said automatically.
“Hank you Tori.”
“Good girl. You go and play with it in the living room.” He led me towards the bedroom. “Thanks for coming.”
“When did it start?”
“Her waters broke last night, but nothing much happened till this morning.”
As soon as Claire got pregnant, Paul brought home all the books he could find in the Barbican library on pregnancy and childbirth, and has been reading up on the subject. I’m not sure this has helped. He now knows in great detail every possible thing that can go wrong. Armed only with a St John’s Ambulance course he took six years ago, he’s not equipped to cope if they do. Now I was there to sit with Claire he went off to make a cup of tea.
An elderly stove made the bedroom smell of paraffin. Claire was sitting up in bed, pale, her hair clinging damply to her forehead. She wore a thick sweater over a nightdress, socks and legwarmers. For a moment she looked pleased to see me, then she shut her eyes, her face scrunched up and a moan escaped her gritted teeth. She inhaled deeply and breathed out through her mouth. I sat by the bed, trying to look relaxed and confident. A positive attitude was all I had to offer. I know nothing about childbirth. I had chicken pox when my school showed the mother-giving-birth video; afterwards my friends told me about it in gruesome detail and I was quite relieved to have missed it. The sum total of my knowledge picked up elsewhere was:
● You have to push but only when you get the urge
● In African tribes they put charcoal on the child’s navel as it’s a natural antiseptic
● If you can’t get to hospital in time, you should sit up with your back against something and your legs apart
● You tie the umbilical cord in two places and cut between the threads with sterilized scissors (I suppose you should boil the thread too)
● It’s important to get all the afterbirth out
And I know there are breathing techniques which allegedly lessen the pain. Claire has been doing breathing exercises religiously for months with the help of a book Paul gave her. I’m sceptical about this except as a distraction, because if it worked then they’d tell you to breathe to combat the pain of a headache or a broken bone, and they don’t. If you have a headache or broken bone, you take aspirin, paracetamol or morphine because unlike breathing, they actually work. But I kept this opinion to myself.
“How are you feeling?”
She grasped my hand, her eyes wide. “Don’t ever have a child, Tori, it’s terrible.”
“Chance would be a fine thing. Fond though I am of Greg, he’s not quite –”
Understandably in the circumstances, Claire interrupted my comment about the desert that is my love life. “I didn’t realize, last time they gave me an epidural. What was I thinking? I must have been crazy. I thought a brother or sister would be nice for Gemma …”
I patted her hand. “So it will. It’ll be over in a few hours, then you’ll have a new baby and you’ll forget all about it. Probably decide to have six more.”
“Paul wanted to get Nina here. Can you imagine? I told him over my dead body.”
“Oh my God. Well, that’s something to be cheerful about.”
Nina is okay I suppose, but she has a view on every topic and expects you to agree. If you don’t, she assumes you haven’t understood her, and explains all over again, more slowly and in greater detail. Sometimes I want to brain her with a brick. I was really pleased when a bad back stopped her coming on our group forages, because without her, dividing the spoil takes no time at all, and it used to take the best part of an hour with Nina present being nitpicky. She’s the last person in the world you’d want to split a restaurant bill with – if there still were any restaurants. Me and the guys, Paul, Greg and Archie, have a swings and roundabouts approach to share-outs. So do Charlie and Sam.
Claire began another contraction. I glanced at my watch and wondered if I should time them – was it a good sign when they got more frequent? The pain must have been worse because she yelled. Afterwards I wiped her face with a flannel from the bedside table, feeling inadequate.
“Tori … supposing I can’t get the baby out?”
There were tears in her eyes. A stab of fear went through me – what an appalling way to die, and poor little Gemma would have to manage in this hostile new world without her mother. Women often died in childbirth before the invention of modern obstetrics; Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia, slowly and agonizingly over days … I spoke robustly.
“You’ll be fine. Loads of women do this every day – well, not the same women, obviously, different ones. But it can’t be that difficult. Anyway, they say it’s easier the second time, and you’ve been practising the breathing, and you’re healthy. Plus you’ve got me here, and I won’t let anything bad happen. Hey, I’m really good at boiling water …”
Claire smiled a scared smile and gripped my hand.
I wouldn’t want another day like that in a hurry. Far too terrifying, and it just went on and on. I am now entirely certain that if God exists, he is male; he could so easily have designed women better. I’d be in favour of laying eggs myself – small ones, about the size of quail eggs. But it was all right in the end. Soon after dusk Claire delivered a healthy baby boy. Paul and I dealt with the umbilical cord between us, and it was obvious even to the uninitiated – i.e. us – that the afterbirth was all there. We opened a bottle of wine and drank to the baby, shaky with relief and triumph. Claire had a cup of tea and couldn’t stop smiling and admiring their new son, her face radiant. They both kept thanking me, though I’d done hardly anything except turn up. A little later I said I must be going.
“Stay here tonight,” Paul said. “It’s dark outside.”
“There’s a full moon and no snow falling.” These days I always know what the phase of the moon is without looking.
“Let me see you home, then.”
“No, you stay with Claire and the children. I’ll be fine.”
The night was beautiful, in a slightly sinister way. Dark skyscrapers loomed on the horizon. Not a breath of wind; a sky of the deepest possible blue, an enormous moon and countless stars. Even the worst situation has some good, and seeing the Milky Way over London is a treat that never dims, even while it brings home to me the world I knew is gone forever.
The wine had made me feel cheerful in spite of my weariness, and I was happy for Claire and Paul. The trek home seemed to pass in a flash. I neared my balcony, looking forward to bed, and paused for a final look round. A few hundred yards away moonlight broke on the mounds of snow from our failed excavation on Old Street, the only disruption of the ubiquitous smoothness; beyond Bézier, candlelight from Greg’s window showed he was still up – he’d missed his wash, we’d have to reschedule. To the north a white carpet interrupted by tower blocks and the odd crane stretched to the horizon.
That’s when I saw something moving.
Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian
CHAPTER 2
The stranger
A long way away, dark against the expanse of white to the north a small shape crept, stopped, moved again. A person crawling on hands and knees, and not one of us, because we seldom go out at night, and when we do, we go to each other’s places. A crazy hope lit up my heart and made me shake all over.
It’s David, come to find me. Please God, let him be all right.
I hurried to my flat, stepped over the glass wall of the narrow balcony, through the patio door and into the dark interior to get my sheet of tough plastic. I climbed once more over the balcony railing and headed as fast as possible into the night towards the distant figure. A man for sure, I could see as I got nearer, inching agonizingly along, his strength almost gone. He had stopped moving by the time I reached him, and lay face down in the s
now. I turned him on his side with trembling hands.
“David?”
Not David.
For a moment my disappointment was so great I wanted to lie down and howl and thump the snow with my fists. I took another look. This man was in his mid-twenties, with a short beard not much longer than stubble, taller than me, wearing dark padded trousers and a jacket with a fur-lined hood. I crouched beside him, fatigue replacing my former excitement.
“Hi, wake up.” Nothing. I shook him but he didn’t respond. I’d have to roll him on to the plastic. I’ve got a trailer made out of the top of a car roof box – we all have – for dragging supplies home, but the plastic sheet, originally used to wrap a double mattress and now with holes cut for handles, is useful for things I can’t lift over the box edge. I rolled him on to the middle of the plastic where he settled on his back. His eyes half opened and he muttered something inaudible.
“What?”
“Rucksack.”
I looked back along his tracks, and saw something dark in the distance. I went to fetch it – the bag was surprisingly heavy, I had to drag it – and dumped it on the plastic beside him. Getting going was hard, but once moving the plastic slid fairly easily over the surface in spite of the combined weight of the man and his belongings.
Back home, hot and sweating, I lumped the backpack over the railing on to the balcony (what on earth was in it?) and tried to lift him. I have crates there so it’s easier when I’m carrying stuff, but getting an inert man over was a different matter. I struggled and heaved. No chance. Having got him this far, I didn’t want him dying outside my window. I could have built ramps out of snow to drag him up and down the other side, but that would take as much time as the alternative option, fetching Greg – twenty minutes at least, and the man would get frostbite if he hadn’t already. I shouted in his face.
Ice Diaries Page 1