2184

by Martin Parish

  I breathed a silent sigh of relief. It didn't seem like we had anything to fear for now. "Can't be easy living where you are," I said.

  "Don't make very much difference when you're set up like I am. I got power, I store up rainwater and filter it, we've got our own food, and I go over to Reading couple times a month for anything I need. Don't need much. Got everything I need, really. I wouldn't move if you paid me. There's only one problem with living out here. No women. But shit, what am I saying.” He chuckled. “That's a good thing, now isn't it." A fast patter ran across the roof like countless little footsteps. "Listen to it." He stepped across the room and closed the shutters.

  "It's coming down fast."

  "If you want, you could go out on the porch and watch it come down. Jesus!” he burst out suddenly. “Maggie, you stupid slowcoach, what're you doing in there?"

  "Sorry, dad," came the lisping voice from the kitchen. "It's almost all ready now."

  "It's about time. What took you so long?" She came round the corner bearing a metal pot on a battered tray with a couple of cups, looking resolutely at the floor. "And you'd better work on that lisp of yours, I swear, it's getting worse lately."

  "Yes, Dad," she said and a flush crept across her cheek. If he derided her in front of strangers, how did he speak to her when they were alone? Perhaps he beat her. Her eager-to-please manner reminded me of the abject way a dog adores an abusive master.

  "All right, let's come on outside, then," the cricket farmer said. "Or actually, why don't you take this out, I want to check something first."

  Outside a curtain of rainfall fell just beyond the porch, and the trees swayed and sank, buffeted by the wind. I forced myself to relax and tried to forget the future. If the Mods really were planning genocide, for the moment there was nothing I could do about it.

  "Hot coffee," I said, "this is more like it."

  "Hear how he talks to her?" Kamal said. "Like she's his drudge."

  "That's probably about what she is," I said. "But it's not my business. Listen, I want to have a word before he comes out here. Why'd you tell him where we were from? You want him to turn us in or something?"

  Kamal shrugged. "It'd be difficult, he'd have to go to Reading. And I thought you were going to come up with some awful story - we walked all the way to Reading to see your aunt who's got rheumatic fever or something. I'd rather tell him where we're from then tell him something he's not going to believe."

  I reflected for a moment. "Fair enough for now. But be more careful."

  "Well-" Kamal was about to say something when the porch door swung open again and the cricket farmer emerged.

  "All right, just wanted to make sure I'd tied something else down outside. The silly girl left the tarp off." He stooped to pour himself some coffee. I noticed a faint whiff of alcohol - probably synthetic liquor - on his breath.

  "Thanks, by the way," I said, "this is really good."

  "Don't mention it." The cricket farmer sipped the coffee with a sigh. "I swear, that girl. She doesn't have to talk with a lisp like that, you know. She's just downright lazy. The thing that worries me is - I don't know what'll happen to her when I'm gone."

  "Could move to Reading."

  "Don't know why she'd be any better off there than here," the farmer said. "It'd probably be even worse. It's a terrible thing for a man to have to say about his own daughter, but my God, she's ugly as sin. It's not as if anybody'll want her with a face like that. And she's so bloody lazy I don't know how she'll keep herself up otherwise."

  "Has she always been like that?" I asked.

  The farmer nodded. "Ever since she was a little girl. Genetic defect, not much I could do about it. From her mother, more'n likely. But it's a hard thing on a man to have to pay twice for marrying a bitch like her mother. First I paid when she was alive and I pay again now that she's dead." He chuckled. "Not that you want to hear about my problems. So tell me, what's the news in London? I haven't heard anything from there for - forever."

  "I haven't been in London in a while myself," I said. "I've been – busy.”

  "Yeah, that's right. So this work camp, how long were you stuck there?"

  "A year," I improvised. There was no sense telling him we'd escaped, so I thought it better to pretend we'd been released after 'doing our time'. "Too long if you ask me."

  "And what'd they have you do?"

  "What they do is, they take the cap off one of the old landfills, then they fence it in and they turn you in to dig it up looking for metals," I explained. "It's not really digging, most of it's sifting through trash."

  "I can tell by your hands," the cricket farmer remarked. "They're all cut up." I glanced down at my hands and realized that he was right.

  "Isn't that funny," I said. "I never even noticed."

  "But if they've got people digging through trash for metals," he speculated, "they must be out."

  "I don't know about that. I think they've got cheap expendable labour and they always need more metal, so of course they're going to."

  "They used to - back after they banned all the cars, there were parts on the engines that were worth something, so some people used to make a living tearing out the old engines and lugging them in for scrap," he said.

  "Well, didn't they used to have....I don't know, parts that had platinum in them," I said.

  "Only if they're older than I am," he said with a snigger.

  "You don't really see too many cars in London any more," Kamal said. "At least, not when I was there. People tore them all up for parts once they couldn't use them. There's a few still rusting here and there.”

  "It's a shame," the farmer said. “Look at those fancy aircars they've got, you'd think they'd let us keep our old junkers. But so tell me then - they just keep you in their landfill a year then they turn you loose?"

  "Exactly," I said. "We came back to Reading. Hopefully we'll be back on the road as soon as this lets up.”

  "What do you want to go back to London for?" Steve asked critically. "You've got people you know there or something?"

  "Yes, that's right."

  "If I was you I wouldn't bother," he said dismissively. "Everyone you knew probably all thinks you're dead by now. You go back there and you have to live like you're just another animal, so they can feed you and round you up whenever they want. So what are you going to go back there for? I say any one place you go is as good as another, as long as there aren't any of the Mods."

  "There's nowhere you can go like that,” I said. “So what would you do?”

  "Exactly what I've done," he said smugly. "The countryside's all strewn with houses just crumbling to pieces. Find one close to a town or whatever, fix it up and get yourself all set up. You can grow enough to feed yourself and sell some for anything you do need. That's what I did years ago, and I haven't looked back ever since. I don't have to bow and scrape and obey orders, 'cause there's no one out here to give me orders. There's a village a half a mile from here, and there's places you could take just right down the road."

  "Don't you ever have any trouble with burglars, or-" Kamal asked.

  "I'm not saying we don't. But we all travel armed out here, 'cause there's none of them here to make us to follow their piffling little rules. That's the trouble with most people, they're most of them such sheep. That's why people still live in the cities. It's because it's all they know and they're scared to try anything else."

  "It's lucky for you that they do, though, isn't it," I said. "If everyone lived like you do, the Mods'd come and round people up out here any time they needed workers for their plants. So the only reason you can live like you do is because most other people don't."

  He nodded reflectively. "That's true enough. That's smart thinking. So you might say it's my good luck that most people don't know any better."

  "Besides which," I added, "you're not really any safer here, you just think you are. If they want you they'll find you."

  "Well, sure. But I'm not going to go put my head in th
e lion's mouth. And at least out here we've got a fighting chance."

  I laughed. I imagined him with his gun, holed up in his shack, hoping to hold them off. "You've got a fighting chance against them? Have you ever seen them fight?"

  "Well, you would say that now, wouldn't you," the farmer remarked, "you've been penned up in one of their work camps for a year now. But there was a time when we fought and killed some of theirs. They lost a lot retaking London. People forget that nowadays. The last battle for London.”

  And in a flash his words brought to mind a memory I didn't want, a memory I had tried for so long to forget. It came to mind now like some submerged monster breaking the stillness of a night-time sea.

  “What are you doing down here?” she said. My mother was a thin woman with an aquiline profile and keen eyes. She had a nervous habit of chewing on her nails. Her long dark hair was tied back that morning and she carried my little sister in the crook of one arm.

  “I came downstairs.”

  “I told you to stay upstairs. You disobeyed me.”

  “But I want to come.” I said. I knew in some nebulous way that she had just made one of those decisions that alters the course of a lifetime. I knew that, even then.

  “I already told you you can't come, we'll be back in a minute.”

  “But I – I -” I faltered.

  “Now go back upstairs. Go on. I've already said goodbye.” I trailed back up the stairs as I heard the front door slam. The sound reverberated through the house as if it had closed forever.

  The hours slipped by, one after the other, and a persistent silence lingered in the house. I heard a distant battery of our missiles firing with a hiss like a rocket tearing through a sleeve. All our guided missiles were useless, the Mods had found ways to counter them: electronic weapons that fried circuits at a distance. We kept on trying, because they were what we had, like Aztec warriors charging Spanish horsemen and knowing even as they do their wooden clubs are useless. I wandered through the rooms and my imagination conjured up phantom Mod soldiers hiding in the closets, watching me with cold metallic eyes.

  Then morning turned into afternoon, and afternoon into evening; and finally I realized she wasn't coming back.

  At some point I became desperate. I opened the door; our car was gone, I knew she'd taken it. I ran down the pavement, crying as I ran. The main streets were a wild melee like the delirium of a nightmare, swarming with pedestrians and cars, people stepping across the bodies left lying on the pavement, a city in motion, a capital in flight. A fire tinted the skyline a dull orange. I ran without knowing where I was going or why, until at last hope died and I returned to the hideous silence and the aching pain, like acid chewing through my heart.

  She lied. She couldn't've lied. What happened to her. She can't be dead. Maybe she'd only meant to be gone a few minutes. Perhaps she lay dead in the streets, cut down by one of their weapons, a “cloaked” and invisible aircar strafing disorganized Mongrels with the methodical precision of a crop duster spraying fields. Or perhaps she'd left never meaning to come back, the way my father left her when I was too young to remember. And as children will, I invented reasons why. Perhaps it was because I was so slow getting ready; perhaps it was because I was stubborn, because I talked back. If I'd behaved better, done the right things, said what I was supposed to...The next morning my uncle stopped by; he'd heard firing in our neighbourhood and he wanted to make sure his sister was all right. He found only an empty building and a gibbering little kid.

  For the rest of the world, the words the last battle for London embody the fire that raged through the West End, St. Paul's Cathedral crumbling, the mob butchered on the South Bank. The same words mean something entirely different for me.

  To this day I don't know what happened to my mother and sister. Did she leave intending to return in a few minutes, and something unknown prevented her? Or were two children too many to care for in a time when the world was falling apart? Yet how cruel, how strange that would be. I don't believe it; I don't want to believe it. Perhaps I'm taking refuge in a delusion, but I believe she was killed while driving, only another casualty of the last battle for London but the one most important to me. In my mind's eye I hear the weapons tear through the roof of the car like bullets through paper, I see the windshield of the car turn milk-white as it fractures, the car skidding across the street into a shop front, the dismal knell of my sister's wail and my mother's bloodied face in the ruins. I see it and I know that it happened, because as terrible as it is, as long as I believe it I can ignore the alternative.

  I paused a moment and suppressed the memory as I had so many times before, thrust it into the background of my consciousness. It wasn't worth recalling. In life you have to take what you can use and discard the rest.

  "A lot of people died. Both Mongrels and Mods,” Kamal said.

  “True,” the farmer said with a nod.

  “I've seen them take thin metal and tear it,” I added. “Like you'd tear cardboard. And those uniforms they wear are stronger than steel - they make them out of, I don't know, nanomaterials.”

  “For sure,” the farmer said. “Now if we really wanted to beat them we'd have to get them at their own game. The thing with the viruses."

  I was startled. It was almost as if he'd guessed my thoughts. “Maybe someone's done that, how do you know?” I said. Kamal looked a question at me. He didn't have to do that; I wasn't about to describe Marengo in detail.

  "What, do you know someone who's working on that?" the cricket farmer asked me.

  "I talked to someone in the camp who was working on something like that," I said.

  "Explains why they were in the camp, now, don't it,” he said. “Thing is, we don't have the technology, we don't have all these super labs we used to. Thing to do woulda been to've killed these genetically enhanced children, soon as there were any.”

  “They probably had a pretty rough time anyway,” Kamal said.

  "But that's not the same thing. Nobody should've ever improved human DNA. I don't know which clever-clogs little arsehole had the idea, but I hope they're burning in hell.” He sipped his coffee.

  Kamal frowned darkly as he gazed out into the pouring rain. "Maybe they thought life'd be better for everyone." It was difficult to understand what our ancestors had been thinking back in those comfortable years of the twenty-first century.

  "There's always some that have and some that don't have," the farmer nodded, "and as for them that don't have, that's us."

  “I don't know,” Kamal said, “I've been a lot worse off.”

  “So've I,” the farmer retorted, “and a lot better off, too.”

  In addition to his synthetic coffee stash, the farmer kept some liquor in a bunch of old plastic jugs. I assumed it was synthetic, but it might have been the kind they make from a species of brown algae, liquor so strong it hits you like a club over the back of the head. You only drink brown algae liquor - syngin(to use the popular pun) - if you want to get drunk fast. He invited us to join him for a glass and I turned him down; if he'd brewed it himself it might give new meaning to “choosing your poison”. He frowned at the jug as he unscrewed the cap.

  "What's the matter, too good to drink with me?"

  "No," I said irritably. "That's not it. Thing is if the rain lets up we could even be back on the road tonight."

  "I'd wait. I think they're building something south of the M4, so they blocked off the road," Steve said.

  "Why would they block off the road, nobody uses it," Kamal asked. If we were walking down the M4 into a trap we wanted to know.

  "I saw a couple of their aircars landing on the M4 just yesterday. I've no idea what for, don't ask me. They don't come and tell me what they're doing.”

  "Maybe they were landing for – for something else," I speculated. The news seemed ill-omened. Yesterday we'd been walking along the M4. Why would they have landed yesterday?

  "Maybe. But they're building something south of the M4, so you'll have to be
careful." He poured some of the synthetic liquor out into his cuand drank it back at a gulp. Maggie had been out of sight for over an hour, and I began to suspect our host's motives. Had we told him too much? Well, if he wanted to give us any trouble I was armed as well; there were two of us and I could take him easily, unless he had a gun.

  "Where's Maggie?" I asked.

  "My daughter?" He frowned hard as if wondering why I'd ask. "Why, what do you care for?"

  "Just curious, she seemed awfully quiet," I said.

  "She's always been that way. Always," he muttered. "But yes, she'll be in the cricket shed cleaning out the brooders."

  "She looks after the crickets then?" Kamal asked.

  "Some of the time, she does," he replied sourly. "But I have to keep after her or I end up doing everything myself."

  "I'm surprised she does that. You know how some women are about live insects," I said.

  "Not when she's been around them as long as she has, no. They're just as ugly as she is, that's why she don't mind 'em. She's used to 'em. You ever seen a cricket shed before?"

  "No, I haven't," I answered.

  "Perhaps you'd like to come and take a look at 'em then."

  "Certainly," I said. Algae farming was very common in London and I knew how it worked, but cricket farms were fewer in number.

  "Come on and follow me then." Kamal and I followed him through the back door, where a grass-grown path led to a pair of long low sheds, the water sluicing off them into a ditch lined with stones.

  "The far one we keep for the algae, this one's for the crickets," he shouted as he fumbled with the keys. "Why'd she do tha-at? She's locked herself in. Silly girl." Finally he opened the door and we followed him inside. The air was stuffy with a dull smell like rotting sawdust, and a fluorescent element illuminated the interior with a dull glow. Metal racks tacked to the walls ran the length of the shed. Atop the racks were stacked large white plastic containers, and from these emanated a noise so loud it was audible over the rain.