Aurora nodded thoughtfully. ‘Once the boxes have been taken away we can put the apartment on the market – these colonial, original New Havana buildings are incredibly desirable. Buyers desperately want a piece of New Havana’s history.’
Harper didn’t care about the history of the building. It had been built in 2015 as one of the many apartment blocks to house those who’d emigrated from London – and it had been created in the British style rather than the Cuban one. Harper knew the apartment would fetch a good price, but she couldn’t stand the thought of a stranger living here. For as long as Harper could remember, this had been her mamina’s home. Harper’s grandfather had passed away before she was born, and when Harper had come to visit her grandmother – which she’d done often – she’d always been the focus of her grandmother’s attention. Harper’s best friend Beatriz had once suggested that Aurora was jealous of the close relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, but at the time Harper had dismissed her. Now she wondered if that was why it was her who’d been asked to sort through Katie’s belongings, rather than Aurora.
‘Is there much more to do in the bedroom?’ Aurora asked. She was distracted by something in her own home in Paris and was oblivious to the pain on Harper’s face.
‘Just the contents of the wardrobe and the dressing table.’
Aurora nodded, and Harper wondered yet again how her mother could be so cold, so distant. Some people had suggested that holograms could never be true reflections of the people whose images they portrayed, but Aurora knew that her mother – who lived a busy life of lunches and shopping – was just as frosty in person as she was in pixels.
‘If you could itemize the jewellery that would be magnificent. And if you spot anything you’d like, do keep it. I know madre would want you to.’ Aurora’s voice was magnanimous, but there was an edge to it. The family had not yet read the will, but there was no question in everyone’s mind that Katie would have left everything to Harper – her beloved only grandchild.
‘Thanks,’ Harper replied softly. She glanced at the wedding dress and debated showing it to her mother, but she then decided against it. Aurora would, at best, only feign interest. ‘I should really get on. I’ll be in touch when I’ve finished.’
When Aurora’s hologram faded away, Harper allowed herself to flop onto her back. She gazed up at the ceiling above the bed and watched the grey, cloudy sky projection that her grandmother had chosen to sleep under. Harper knew it was a replica of the weather in England, and she wished again that she’d thought to ask her grandmother about the time she’d lived in London. She knew Katie had survived the attack on London in 2014 in which six million people had been killed, and she knew that her grandmother had been part of the exodus that had helped to create New Havana, but she knew so little of Katie’s life in the former capital of England.
Harper dragged herself off the bed, put the wedding dress to one side and instead examined the carved wooden box that her grandmother had kept in her wardrobe. When Harper had been little she’d thought it had contained magic, but Katie had never let her granddaughter look inside it – she’d said that Harper would be allowed to when she was grown up. That time had now come and despite her curiousness, Harper was reluctant to open it because it truly meant that her mamina had gone. But when Harper pulled the lid off the box, she was surprised to find that nestled within the satin lining was a bundle of traditional letters.
Harper gently untied the silk ribbon around them and lifted the first from the pile. The paper of the envelope was thin and brittle, and as Harper gazed at it she wondered if she’d be invading her grandmother’s private life if she read the letter inside – for it wasn’t addressed to Katie, but to someone named ‘Blue’. She thought of her grandmother’s face, remembered how much Katie had loved her, and decided that she wouldn’t mind at all. The letter was written in her grandmother’s curly, indigo-inked hand and was addressed to ‘My darling Blue.’ Intrigued, Harper read on – and she was instantly taken to London sixty-one years earlier as Katie recalled the day of destruction that would change the world forever.
London, England, February 14th 2014
Katie ran so desperately through the burning city that she was oblivious to her bloodied feet and the ash that coated her body. But the longer she ran, the more she discovered that there was nowhere safe to run to. Everything had been bombed, everything was on fire, and there was no way out. Katie reached the Thames and she knew she had to get as far away from it as possible: she had to get away from the centre of the city and as far out to the suburbs as she could. She could barely see through the thick smoke that surrounded her, but Katie knew that she needed transport, knew that she needed to get out of town as fast as she could.
As Katie ran over Waterloo Bridge – the only bridge, she remembered, that had been damaged during the Blitz – she nearly tripped over a bicycle. She knew she didn’t have time to pause or to see if she could find the owner through the destruction that surrounded her, so she swallowed hard, picked up the bike and began pedaling south as quickly as she could. She had no idea where she was going, or what she was going to do – she just had to try to survive the Hell that rained down on her city.
The faster Katie pedaled, the more her eyes began to water as the acrid smoke began to sting. Katie wanted to stop to catch her breath, wanted to wipe her eyes so she could see properly, but she knew that pausing for even a second would be dangerous. The bombs continued to fall in front of her, behind her, and even though she could barely see for all the ash, Katie still pedaled. She rode past the shattered BFI Imax cinema, past the burning rubble where the Old Vic had once proudly stood, and Katie was about to reach the obelisk at St George’s Circus when she suddenly rode into something and fell off her bike in a heap.
‘What the fuck?’ a male voice growled angrily, and Katie saw and felt his form – large, broad and strong – over her. She leapt to her feet and put her hands proprietarily on the handlebars of the bicycle. She would not let go of the bike: Katie would not relinquish her only chance at getting out of here alive.
‘I didn’t see you,’ she yelled over the noise of the planes overhead. Katie briefly considered apologising, but a bomb fell perilously close to where they stood. Apologising for something so trivial was preposterous when they were caught up in such destruction.
‘We have to get out of here,’ the man said forcefully. ‘We need to leave now.’ His face came into view through the smoke, but Katie was too full of adrenaline and too scared of the chaos that surrounded them to look at him properly. Her eyes darted everywhere around her as she looked for a way out.
The man grabbed the bicycle from her and swung his leg over the frame. ‘Get on the seat,’ he barked at her. ‘I’ll pedal.’
Katie froze. She was no match for this man in terms of strength, and if he wanted to take the bicycle from her, he would.
‘I said, get on,’ the man stressed. ‘I’m getting out of here but I’m not leaving without you.’ He turned his head over his shoulder to look at her, and Katie locked eyes with him. The man’s face was dirty and bloody, but his eyes were an intense, astonishing blue.
She hopped onto the small bicycle seat, wrapped her arms around the stranger’s back, and he pedaled furiously away from the fires that grew around them.
New Havana, Cuba, June 2075
Harper’s hands shook as she tried to picture Katie’s attempt to escape the bombs over London. But despite reading the words over and over again, Harper couldn’t imagine her grandmother on a bicycle – and a retro, non-electric one at that – as she and a man pedaled away from a city that was being systematically ruined, couldn’t imagine her careful grandmother teaming up with a stranger to escape the carnage that had surrounded them. Harper had known her grandmother as a gentle, quiet woman – yet despite how close they’d always been, she’d never spoken about how she’d battled the unimaginable and had escaped London.
Harper took a deep breath and asked the digital assist
ant to make her a cup of tea – an unfashionable, English habit that she’d adopted from her grandmother – and after the rusty, domestic drone had brought it to her, she sat on the edge of the bed and examined the wooden box of letters more carefully. Inside were countless envelopes, all written to ‘Blue’ but all without an address. Who was Blue? Harper couldn’t remember her grandmother ever mentioning anyone of that name. Could it be a nickname? Harper couldn’t be sure – she found the names of her grandmother’s generation so strange: she couldn’t imagine anyone being called Lindsey, Julie or Holly now.
Despite knowing that she had to pack up the rest of her grandmother’s belongings, Harper dawdled over the letters as she sipped on her tea. She discovered that they were organized in date order – with the first letter on top of the beribboned pile the first that Katie had written – and Harper struggled not to read them all instantly. Instead she forced herself to pack up the room and told herself that the sooner she removed all of Katie’s possessions from the apartment, the sooner she’d feel better. She remembered a phrase Katie used to say to her about plasters and needing to rip them off quickly, and although Harper didn’t know what a plaster was – other than it was something medical from the olden days – she knew that her grandmother meant that it was better to get things over and done with. Harper put the letters back in the box, finished the rest of her tea and set herself to work. Within several hours, Katie’s whole life was packed away, and there was nothing left outside of the silicon packing boxes to suggest that she’d ever lived on the Malecón – nothing, that was, apart from Katie’s granddaughter who looked both forlorn and a little bit lost.
Harper pulled herself together and reluctantly wandered out of the apartment and into the hot evening air of New Havana. She clutched at the wooden box of letters tightly, and even though she was desperate to read them and to find out more about her grandmother’s past, she knew she had to wait. Harper had promised to meet her best friend Beatriz for a drink: Bea was fed up as her latest boyfriend kept choosing digital sex over quality time with her – he’d been struggling with his addiction to hologram pornography and he was clearly losing the battle.
As Harper wound her way through Avenida 23 and through the groups of Habaneros drinking mojitos on the pavement, she wondered what advice she could offer Bea should her friend ask for it. Harper had had so few boyfriends that she didn’t feel she could suggest anything of use: most people believed romantic relationships to be antiquated and Harper was one of them. Digital assistants now provided almost everything another person could provide – such as friendship, companionship and comfort – and unlike a relationship with another person, there was no compromise involved. The only downside, of course, was that one couldn’t have a sexual relationship with their assistant…and that was why so many were addicted to hologram pornography. Bea’s boyfriend was not unusual in his predicament.
Harper walked through the doorway of La Art de Torres on Calle N and noticed that Beatriz was already at the bar. She had a drink in one hand and took a long glug of it every time her watch glowed with a new message from her boyfriend. When Beatriz spotted Harper she offered her a wry smile.
‘Oliverio thinks he’s in love with his hologram,’ Bea said as soon as Harper sat down. ‘He says he likes me, that he’s quite fond of me, but that I don’t measure up to his stupid ’gram, who he’s named “Ula”.’ She looked cross as she offered Harper her wrist so she could read Oliverio’s most recent messages. ‘But how can I compete when he created her and gave her unrealistic tits and ass?’
Harper shook her head. ‘He’s a gilipollas,’ she said conversationally. ‘An utter shit. Most men are.’
Bea looked forlorn. ‘Everyone told me that trying to have a relationship would be difficult and that they’ve been dying out for a reason, but I’m a sucker for romance. I want what my parents had – however old-fashioned that may be. Don’t you?’
Harper considered the question. Like so many of her generation she’d been created in a lab using some of Aurora’s DNA; when she was nine months old she’d been presented to her mother as a perfectly formed baby. She had no idea who her biological father was, and therefore she hadn’t grown up in an environment where romance or relationships had existed. When she read novels about love she found them uncomfortable – she didn’t doubt that sexual attraction was once very real, but she’d never felt it for herself. Not like poor Beatriz.
‘I’m just not sure romance and love is realistic or sustainable,’ Harper said lightly. ‘It’s a nice concept, but it’s like something out of a movie.’
Bea looked glum. ‘Maybe I should give it all up and create a hologram all of my own,’ she said. ‘But once you do that there’s no turning back, is there. Once you create your perfect ’gram it’s a sign that you don’t think it’s worth dating real men.’
Harper shrugged. ‘I’m not sure it is – besides, who wants to anyway?’
Bea deleted the messages from Oliverio on her watch and then turned her full attention to Harper. ‘How was it at your grandmother’s place today? And what do you have in your hands? Is that box made of real wood?’
Harper slid the box across the bar towards her. ‘It’s real wood,’ she confirmed. Nothing had been made of wood in forty years: the United Nations (as it had been known then) had outlawed the practice to protect the few remaining forests. ‘But what’s more interesting to me is what’s inside it – there are lots of traditional paper letters that my grandmother wrote but never sent.’
‘Can I take a look?’ Bea asked. ‘I’ve never seen a real paper letter before. They were written before those old email things, weren’t they?’
Harper nodded as she watched her friend open the box.
‘These are amazing,’ Bea breathed. She gently traced her finger over the indigo ink that spelled out ‘Blue’ on the envelope. ‘They belong in a museum. How many of them have you read? And why do you think this Blue person never received them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harper admitted. ‘Katie definitely wrote them – but maybe she didn’t have Blue’s address, or maybe Blue wasn’t a real person. Maybe these are more like diary entries than like real letters.’
Beatriz bit her lip and carefully lifted the pile of letters out from inside the box. ‘Shall we find out if that’s the case?’ she asked. Harper felt momentarily uncomfortable at the thought of Beatriz reading one of her grandmother’s personal letters, but her worry passed in an instant: Bea had been her best friend forever and Katie had loved her too. Harper untied the silk ribbon, opened the second envelope of the pile, and in the heart and the heat of New Havana, the two girls read Katie’s next letter to Blue.
London, England, February 14th 2014
The man pedaled for miles. The harsh, relentless rain lashed at his face, and as the bicycle wobbled in the storm around them, Katie’s grip around him tightened. There was something intimate about the way their hot bodies pressed together as they fled for their lives, and as Katie felt his heart pound through his thin windcheater she wished there wasn’t this enforced physical familiarity between them. However, the man was oblivious to Katie’s discomfort – his whole focus was on the battle of escaping the bombs. He swerved the debris on the roads – blackened bricks from collapsed buildings, slabs of concrete that had appeared seemingly from nowhere – and even though the bombs relentlessly continued to fall, he continued to pedal. He stopped for nothing and he cycled for their lives.
After what felt like days – but couldn’t have been more than half an hour – Katie and the man reached the suburbs. Here, too, were bombed-out buildings – but there was less panic and marginally less ash in the air. Katie didn’t recognise where they were: she only knew they were south of the river in a maze of faceless, characterless Victorian terraces that had proudly survived the Blitz but sadly wouldn’t endure this.
‘Where are we going?’ Katie yelled into the man’s ear as his frantic pedaling slowed to a dull pace. The stranger didn’t reply, but K
atie noticed his jaw tighten and felt his back tense. After several more minutes the man reached a row of houses that had only just been hit. He stopped in front of one of them – the one that was aflame with a vicious, merciless fire – and he stared up at it. The man’s face was expressionless, but tears slid down his face. Katie didn’t ask why they had stopped in front of this house – she didn’t need to. This had clearly been the man’s home.
‘We need to get on,’ the man said in a clipped voice as he pulled his gaze away from the house and looked up at the sky. Planes still circled overhead and the bombs still rained down. It was unyielding, unrelenting and terribly cruel. ‘We need to get to safety.’
Katie wanted to cry too. She was exhausted, broken. She knew her own flat would resemble this man’s home and she couldn’t bear to think that this was real life, that this was happening to them, and that life – or whatever remained of it after London had been wiped out – would never be the same again.
‘Nowhere in London is safe,’ she whispered. ‘What hope do we have?’ Katie wasn’t one for giving up easily, but the sights she’d seen on the way here had bruised her spirit. She’d never seen such devastation, such bloodshed, and she knew that if she lived she’d never be able to forget the things she’d just seen. London was a warzone and she had no idea why.
‘I know of somewhere close by,’ the man said. He wiped the tears from his face, but he did so roughly and it was as if he was cross that he’d been forced to acknowledge his uncontrolled emotion. He then took Katie’s hand in his and began to pull her away from the burning buildings. ‘Let’s go.’
The man abandoned the bicycle and Katie allowed him to lead the way. They walked quickly through streets that had once been lined with houses, and despite the noise of planes, of falling bombs, of the fires that spread from one bombsite to another, Katie was struck by the lack of human noise. Not another person was to be seen: they truly were in the midst of an apocalypse.
SUNLOUNGER 2: Beach Read Bliss (Sunlounger Stories) Page 25