From the top of Parliament Hill, we could see London spread out before us. To my disappointment, there was very little to see. In former times, you would have had a view of the city stretching from Canary Wharf to the Shard, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the London Eye. It would have been illuminated by thousands upon thousands of lights. Now everything was lost in darkness. There were occasional pinpoints of lights where people were, presumably, using some kind of battery-operated illumination. And there were some fires burning here and there: small fires down on the South Bank, Primrose Hill, Hyde Park and a few other places. A much bigger fire in the region of Covent Garden that looked as if some buildings had been set ablaze. I wondered if there would be anyone to put those fires out. If the flames spread, maybe London would be ravaged by another Great Fire even more devastating than the one that had destroyed the city in 1666.
“It must have been like this in the War,” Leila said.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure which war she meant. In its history, London has survived a few of them.
“The Second World War,” she said, “The Blitz. When all the lights were out and everything was silent. Until the planes came.”
“Well, there are no planes now,” Geoff said.
“Thank God,” said Leila.
She was still convinced that the Americans had a secret plan to bomb Britain. That they would try to bomb the disease to oblivion and that they would be prepared to sacrifice London, England, maybe all of Europe, to achieve that goal. I thought Leila was nuts. Paranoid. Even so, when I looked at the sky I dreaded the prospect of seeing planes there. If the planes came, I didn’t think they would be on a rescue mission.
When we came down off Parliament Hill, I was pleased to see that the Land Rover was just where we had left it. Nobody had tried to steal it. Nobody had smashed its windows or slashed its tyres. We decided to drive on towards Bayswater. I knew someone there. Someone who I hoped could help us.
We got into the Land Rover and I tried to start it up. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing happened. Then I realised what the problem was. Some swine had syphoned the fuel out of our tank!
“People can be so inconsiderate,” Leila grumbled.
So we set off with our jerry cans and a length of plastic pipe and started looking for some convenient vans or trucks to syphon fuel from. These days, it’s a syphon-or-be-syphoned world.
5
We took a roundabout route to Bayswater, going via Paddington, Kensal Green and Wormwood Scrubs. I wanted to avoid central London as much as possible. I had a bad feeling that going via Oxford Street and the West End would be asking for trouble.
I was looking for a flat close to St Petersburgh Mews, which is up towards the Queensway end of the Bayswater Road. My friend, Justin, lived there. It was Justin, as I think I’ve already said, who had rented me his country cottage in the back of beyond. I’m not sure how he came to have a country cottage. He was from one of those families that took that sort of thing for granted. I’d known Justin since our college days. Back then he was planning to be a novelist and I was planning to be a rock star. He ended up as a freelance journalist, writing columns and interviews for newspapers and magazines you’ve probably never even heard of. And I ended up as a guitar teacher. A second-rate guitar teacher, at that.
Notting Hill and Bayswater were in pretty much the same state as Hampstead. Windows were broken, shops had been looted, there were some lights showing in the houses which I supposed must have been battery-lamps or candles. There was some traffic on the roads. There were even some people on bicycles. Random groups of young people were wandering about or sitting on walls, doorsteps and pavements. There were a few older people around too, I noticed. People in their thirties and forties at any rate. Maybe the Colonel had been right. Maybe order was being restored. I didn’t see any policemen though.
There’s not much more to say about our time in Bayswater. Justin’s flat was locked. I hammered on the door but there was no answer. Then a woman’s voice spoke from behind me. I turned and shone my torch on the door of the flat opposite. It was open just a crack. I noticed the security chain was still attached. I couldn’t see who was behind the door though. The woman’s voice said, “He’s gone. Went last week.”
“Do you know where he went to?”
“The countryside, I think. He has a cottage there, apparently.”
Something brushed against my ankles. I looked down and it was a cat. A black cat with a white bib and white paws. “Sorry,” said the woman and she opened the door and came into the corridor. That was the first good look I got of her. She was young and undoubtedly attractive with platinum blonde hair that had come out of a bottle. As she stooped to pick up the cat, a little girl ran up behind her. The woman turned to the girl and snapped, “I told you, Alice. Never come to the door. You know it’s not safe.”
“But Tiddles…” wailed the girl.
The blonde woman handed the cat to the girl and then looked back at me. “Yeah,” she said, “He went to the countryside. You won’t find him, though. And anyway, I don’t think he wants to be found.”
So that was that. There was nothing to keep us in London. It seemed to me that London was a city of the young, the desperate and the dying. I was all for leaving, and the sooner the better. But leaving wasn’t that simple. We headed back up the Bayswater Road towards Marble Arch. Hyde Park stretched away into the darkness on the right. Faceless Victorian buildings and deserted fast-food shops lined the road to our left.
Then we skirted around Marble Arch itself – a hideous, 19th Century white-marble triumphal arch that’s plonked inconveniently in the middle of the road – and we continued on down Oxford Street. Or anyway, we tried to. We didn’t get very far. When we got to Selfridges, the road became impassable. It was filled with mounds of stone and concrete. The source of all the rubble was obvious. It looked as though someone had set off a medium-sized bomb in Selfridges. The building was in ruins. Its partially demolished columns rose upwards like some classical ruin – a department-store Parthenon.
“Who’d want to bomb Selfridges?” – Leila was genuinely shocked. More shocked than by the bodies that lay heaped and discarded on the pavements. We were so used to the sight of corpses by now that they had become commonplace and unremarkable.
“I never been to London,” Geoff said, “This is the first time.”
“It’s seen better days,” I said.
So then we turned around and took the road leading south. On our left we passed the Dorchester Hotel and then the London Hilton.
“We could see if they have a room free,” I quipped, “Would madam care to try the penthouse suite?”
We went down Grosvenor Place and then turned left. A short while later we were in front of Buckingham Palace. You could tell is was Buckingham Palace because there were electric lights illuminating the building. Not only were there lights. There were also guards. Ceremonial guards, wearing red jackets and bearskins. They were standing behind the railings and the gates. They didn’t look like they were there to welcome tourists. They had their guns at the ready, aiming through the railings, ready to deal with anyone who came too close. We decided that we’d already come close enough so I veered off up the Mall.
“Looks like the royals are in residence then,” Geoff said.
“Electric lights,” Leila said, “They must have their own generator. Very posh.”
We couldn’t go any further because up ahead there were roadblocks. The roadblocks were manned by soldiers. No bearskins this time. Just regular Army uniforms. And guns. Lots of guns. I did a U-turn and soon we were heading back up past the Dorchester.
“I suppose we could stay there,” I said, “I mean, is there anyone to stop us?”
“I think there may be,” said Leila.
I saw what she meant. The front doors had been smashed in and there were lanterns inside. By their light, it looked as though an orgy was in progress. I guessed that gangs of red-eyes must have broken in an
d seized the building for their own use. My first thought was: why didn’t the Army stop them? We’d seen soldiers in and around Buckingham Palace, which wasn’t so far away, after all.
But then again, why would the Army bother to protect a mere hotel? They hadn’t protected Selfridges. They hadn’t stopped the looting, the rioting and the killing in Hampstead and Bayswater. I thought about the fires I’d seen when we’d walked to the top of Parliament Hill. The anarchy was so widespread that it would have been impossible for the Army to deal with it. Besides which, I couldn’t be sure how functional the Army was any longer. Maybe it didn’t have the manpower or the organisation?
We drove on.
6
We ended up in a clapped out block of flats in the Elephant and Castle. It was one of those faceless, beige brick buildings that looked as though they might have been designed with Lego some time in the 1960s. It was five storeys high and we found a flat on the fourth floor. We’d planned to stay there overnight. We ended up staying for over week. Maybe it was laziness. Maybe it was because we had nowhere else to go. The flat was furnished, it was unlocked, it had two bedrooms, a kitchen-diner and a bathroom. Amazingly the water was still flowing so the toilet flushed but the shower was icy cold. At least I was able to get a shave at last.
Another bonus of the flat was that there were no dead people in it. It had previously been occupied by an elderly couple. The flat was filled with their emptiness. There were old photographs of a young couple in happier times and of a small, smiling girl who eventually became a tall, smiling woman. There were old vinyl records: Mantovani, Hawaiian Guitar Favourites, Frank Sinatra. There were knickknacks from long-ago holidays – a cuckoo clock from Switzerland, a miniature Eiffel Tower from Paris. There were memories everywhere of hopes and dreams that had faded away to nothing.
The woman who lived in the flat across the hallway (her name was Elvira Simms, she had come from the Caribbean as a teenager, she said, and had lived in the Elephant and Castle ever since) told us about the couple whose flat we were now squatting in.
“They only moved in a couple of years ago,” Elvira told us over a cup of herbal tea, of which she was inordinately fond, “Mr and Mrs Craddock. He’d been a school teacher. I don’t know what she’d been, she never said. A housewife maybe.” – and Elvira laughed so hard that her herbal tea slopped over the edges of her cup. Elvira had a powerful laugh and she wasn’t afraid to use it.
Elvira didn’t know why Mr and Mrs Craddock had left their flat. “They didn’t talk much. Not to me anyway. I think they thought these flats were beneath them. They’d lived in a detached house somewhere before they came here. I got the impression they’d had to sell up. Fallen on hard times, something like that.”
Their flat was in immaculate condition. It looked as though they’d cleaned and dusted before they’d left. Elvira thought they might have been frightened by the state of London – the gangs, the violence. Maybe they’d thought that the countryside would be safer than the city. Maybe they’d realised that, just as there were deserted flats in London, there would be deserted houses in the countryside. Maybe they’d gone looking for the good life that they’d thought they had lost. If so, good luck to them. I hope they found it.
We learnt a lot about the downfall of London from Elvira. The basic services – electricity, phones, hospitals, police – had lasted longer in London than they had out in the countryside. But as more old people became sick and more young people lost their inhibitions and turned to violence, things started to fall apart.
“We still got police,” Elvira said, “I see the police cars going past, all their sirens going, just like in the old days. But I think they’re looking after themselves. There’s no damn’ way they’re looking after us.”
The block of flats was two-thirds empty now. Some of the older people had died. In the early days, they were taken to hospital when they got sick. Then later, sick people were left where they were and the bodies were taken away when they died.
“And then, after a while, when someone died, nobody came so we had to get rid of them ourselves. The old woman who lived in the flat next to mine passed over a couple of weeks ago. We managed to get her down the stairs, me and Fred and Bill and Jimmy and some of the other residents. And we buried her in the Kiddies’ playground down the road.”
“You never got sick?” I said.
She laughed with a thunderous, flesh-wobbling roar, “Me! No damn’ flu bug’s gonna get rid of me that easy. I put it down to the chillies. Eat plenty of chillies and the bugs don’t stand a chance.”
It was a theory, I suppose.
On the whole, we got ourselves pretty comfortable in that flat. There was only one way into the block – an arched entrance facing the street – and that had been blocked off by filling it with packing cases and heavy wooden furniture. The entrance was guarded day and night by residents of the building. They took it in shifts. The night we’d arrived, the entrance had been guarded by a youngish, muscular man by the name of Jimmy Jepson. I think he was about my age – late twenties or early thirties. He had the solid, squarish physique that I associate with rugby players. He’d been lounging outside the entrance smoking a cigarette when he’d caught sight of us. We’d been wandering in the area looking for somewhere to stay and the block of flats looked promising. I’d gone and talked to him, he’d decided we were decent, trustworthy people (luckily the night had been dark so he didn’t catch sight of Leila’s eyes) and then he’d told us about the empty flat.
There’s not really too much more to say about our stay in London. We weren’t there to see the sights. We stayed indoors most of the time. In the evenings we did some foraging. Most of the shops had been cleared out. But there were plenty of vacant houses that still had stores worth exploring. We made some good finds. In one house we found jars of caviar; the real-stuff, not the cheap lumpfish eggs they sell in supermarkets. In another house we found a cellar full of vintage wines. We went back there a few nights running. I woke up with headaches made of vintage Pouilly-Fumé and Laurent Perrier. We stocked up on tins of dog food for Bobby and a pair of Yves Saint-Laurent dark glasses for Leila. If she wore those, I hoped it might help avoid some awkward questions about her eyes.
A lot of the houses contained bodies. Many of them had been there for some weeks. The rats had got at them, the flies had got at them. Some of them were pretty damned putrid. Often those places had the best pickings. I guess even the red-eyes preferred looting supermarket and pubs to houses that stank of rotting corpses.
You have to remember that I’m talking about the relatively early days. This was maybe a month – five weeks or so, I guess – after the great snow. The red-eyes were heading on the downward slope by then, but there were some, a few, that retained traces of humanity. Some of them had succumbed to the disease. Not all the dead bodies we saw were old people. With others, their bodies had recovered but their minds were gone. But when they formed packs, as they almost invariably did, they were definitely not the kind of people you’d want to socialise with. They were mad, bad and dangerous to know.
Even so, Elvira told us that the red-eyes weren’t the ones we needed to be worried about. “It’s the vigilantes you want to watch out for,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant. Then one night we found out.
7
It was gone midnight and we were scavenging from flats down Stockwell way. We were on foot. We went everywhere on foot at night. It was easier to get to places and attracted less attention than driving. It also let us travel underground. It had been Elvira who’d given us that idea. You could go down to the Elephant and Castle tube station, then walk along the tunnels. Take the Bakerloo line and you could go under the Thames and be in Charing Cross in less than an hour. Take the Northern line and it was a fairly short walk south to Kennington and Stockwell. We stuck to the Northern Line. We wanted to stay as far from the centre of town as possible. Our brief experience of everywhere from Hampstead to Oxford Street had persuaded us that sou
th of the river was a better place to be. The red-eye gangs tended to congregate towards what had formerly been the major centres. Were they still going to the cinemas and theatres on Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, I wonder? There wouldn’t have been any point in doing so because the cinematic and theatrical life of the West End was by now a thing of the past. Maybe they just congregated there from habit? Maybe they wanted to be among crowds of their own sort. Maybe their old haunts – the clubs of Mayfair, the pubs of Soho – acted as some sort of irresistible attraction to them?
Kennington and Stockwell held no such attractions. After dark, you could often wander the streets and see nobody. There were occasional small clutches of red-eyes, looking lost, as though they’d booked tickets for a big show but couldn’t find the venue.
We were used to the red-eyes by now. We knew they could be violent, we knew they could be irrational. But as long as we kept out of their way, we soon realised that they didn’t need to be a threat. Well, not most of the time. Often they just seemed to be out of their heads. As though they were drunk or high on drugs. Or maybe it was more like a sort of dementia. They seemed to move with a purpose that was defined by the group rather than the individual. The way that flocks of starlings seem to fly with purpose even though the movement of each individual bird seems to be unfocussed and without direction.
Only rarely did we see a solitary red-eye. I think those who remained alone were the ones who had entered a more serious stage of the sickness. Sometimes we saw people staggering, lurching, as though they weren’t in full control of their limbs. Occasionally, we came across people lying on the ground, looking at first sight like dead bodies. But when you drew closer you would see the limbs twitching. Or sometimes the person’s face would turn towards you, skeletal and agonised, the mouth struggling to form words that came out in the form of a drooling mumble. Whether these were really human beings any longer, or whether their loss of reason was so profound that it had robbed them of their humanity, I cannot say. What is certain is that they held for me a pathos and a revulsion that is impossible to put into words. They looked like people, but their minds were gone; their bodies were empty shells whose vacancy was filled with nothing but pain and loss.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 14