Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

  ‘Is it time?’ Charlie cried, gazing down on the flooding world. The force of the storm had sucked out a row of shopfront windows. At the far corner of the street, two men were attempting to paddle a raft upstream towards a blown-out grocery shop.

  The raft had been made by lashing together some wooden packing crates. The sailors were stealing everything they could snatch, loading their boat with a random cargo of bottles and boxes. You had to admire their spirit. They had less than four minutes left of their lives and they were out there shopping for luxuries. They were fighting with a carton containing a hundred tubes of Spearmint flavour Plaque-Buster™ toothpaste when the raft buckled and sank beneath them. They called out and waved their arms, swept away in a rushing torrent of rain and mud.

  ‘Time?’ the Deep Time Mariner growled, turning abruptly and knocking Charlie to the floor. ‘Time? It’s time I was gone!’

  ‘Is this how it ends?’ Charlie shouted.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ the Mariner said impatiently. ‘It’s your planet. It’s your funeral.’

  'No!' Charlie shouted. ‘You can’t leave me here. I don’t believe this is happening.’

  ‘Another dream!’ Einstein barked, creeping behind his master’s legs. ‘Tell me it’s another dream.’

  ‘The time for dreams is passed,’ the Mariner said. ‘This is the end of dreams.’

  ‘It can’t be too late,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s never too late. There’s always a chance.’

  ‘It’s too late for the Antarctic wolf and the Atlas bear,’ the Deep Time Mariner shouted. ‘It’s too late for the Barbary lion and Arabian ostrich. There’s no hope for the Caribbean monk seal and the Mauritian giant tortoise. No chance left for the Guadeloupe storm petrel and the Madagascar serpent eagle, the elephant bird and the passenger pigeon, the sea cow and the ocean mink, the Bali tiger and Eskimo curlew. So don’t ask me for any favours, monkey-man!’

  ‘There’s nothing to be done?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Nothing,’ the Mariner said mildly. ‘Consider yourselves a vanishing species.’ He pulled the pistol from his flying suit and carefully checked the compression chamber. He had instructions to employ whatever force he felt necessary to allow him to complete his mission. There was still enough power in his sedative gun to knock down a full-grown rhinoceros.

  ‘There’s one last word of advice,’ he said, slapping his pockets and turning to Charlie as if he’d forgotten something.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said eagerly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be nice to each other,’ the Deep Time Mariner said. ‘Talk to your dog.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Charlie shrieked.

  60.

  At that moment the ghost of Fat Harry came plummeting through the ceiling. He had come straight from an air disaster in mid-Atlantic. He was baffled and confused by the interruption in his journey. He was wearing a pair of one-size airline slippers and holding a Super-Executive breakfast menu card in his hand.

  ‘Am I dead. Charlie?’ he wheezed as he hit the floor.

  Charlie jumped back in surprise, peered up at the ceiling and nodded his head at the corpulent phantom.

  ‘Bugger it!’ Fat Harry said, staring mournfully at the menu. ‘I was going to have the deluxe breakfast.’

  He had been flying to New York for his latest, and most important, one-man exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum of Everyday Life when the aircraft had hit a freak storm five hundred and forty miles across the Atlantic.

  He should not have died. He should not have been locked in that doomed aircraft. He was booked to catch an earlier flight but once he had packed and was ready to ride to the airport, he’d had a vague, uneasy feeling that something was missing. He checked his tickets and passport, wallet and fly buttons. Nothing was out of place. But the feeling continued to trouble him until he’d realised what he’d forgotten. He hadn’t told Charlie! He couldn’t leave without calling him. He wanted Charlie to know all about the big exhibition and feel pleased and excited for him. He still thought of Charlie as his friend. So he put down his suitcase and pulled the phone from his jacket pocket.

  The phone seemed to ring for a long time and, when it was finally answered, an unknown voice had challenged him.

  ‘Who are you?’ Patch Armstrong said suspiciously. His voice sounded familiar but then, she had known a great number of men and she couldn’t tell one from another. ‘If this is a dirty phone call, I’m warning you now, I’m holding a night-attack alarm. One false move and I’ll burst your eardrums.’

  ‘Harry!’ Harry said. ‘It’s Harry. Can I speak to Charlie?’

  There was a long pause, a brief scuffle, and then he heard Baxter’s stinging voice.

  ‘Do you know the time?’ she shouted. ‘It’s five o’clock in the morning. There are little children in this house who need to sleep. What the hell is wrong with you? Do you want to stunt their growth? Are you sick in the head or what?’

  ‘Hello. Baxter,’ Harry said cheerfully. ‘It’s Harry. Harry Prampolini. You remember me.’

  ‘I’m trying to forget!’ Baxter snapped. Fat Harry the circus freak with his cheap jokes and swaggering walk and greasy grin and one-man shows at every important museum in Europe. Fat Harry the tattooed toad with his ridiculous pink silk suits and crocodile shoes and his big cigars and his work included in the Tate gallery’s exhibition of Post-Nuclear Art. There seemed so much of him to forget.

  ‘Can I speak to Charlie?’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘But it’s five o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘He’s still not here.’

  ‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ Harry said. ‘It’s important that I talk to him. Is he at the office or something? Has he gone away on a business trip?’

  ‘Search me.’ Baxter said.

  Fat Harry might have considered it if he hadn’t been so pressed for time. ‘But you’re married to him,’ he grumbled. Why did she always want to play games? There was something deeply disturbed about Baxter. ‘Don’t give me all this horseshit. I’ve got to catch a plane.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Baxter said.

  ‘Will you give him a message?’

  ‘Run your own errands!’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘We threw him out!’ Baxter exploded. ‘I don’t know and I really don’t care where the bastard has gone. He’s no longer my husband or the father of my child. He’s finished. He’s nothing. If you want to find him, try looking under a stone!’

  And she slammed the phone and burst into tears.

  Harry continued to hold the phone against his ear for a few moments, listening to nothing. His first thought, once he’d made sense of Baxter’s bulletin, was to ring again and offer his own opinions about the marriage and her skills as a wife and mother. But there was no time for a shouting match. It was impossible.

  He rode to the airport feeling bad, lost his coat and missed his flight. He sat in the Super-Executive lounge drinking endless cups of black coffee while they searched for the coat and found him a seat on another plane. Why did they build these airports to look like cheap hotels? A wasteland of self-service snackeries, industrial carpet and shopping arcades. There were plastic plants potted in concrete blocks and chairs bolted into the floor as if they feared madmen would steal them. The coffee began to turn sour in his stomach and the neon strips burned his eyes.

  He didn’t recover his spirits until he was soaring over the Atlantic and the smell of breakfast had started to drift from the galleys. He accepted a glass or two of champagne and felt his good humour return as he settled down to wait for his breakfast tray.

  But breakfast would never be served.

  The storm was a funnel of darkness, reaching up through the banks of cloud, like a cobra drawn from a basket. As they approached, the funnel became a violent whirlpool of smoke and soot and human debris that seemed to suck them into its throat. The big Boeing bucked and yawed as the pilot lost the controls and they descended down through a maels
trom of lampshades, knitting needles telephones, electric toasters, forks, spoons. frying pans, beer cans, bamboo chairs, spectacles, gloves and artificial limbs. The four engines stopped and in the silence everyone screamed.

  The flight attendant who had been serving Harry with his third glass of champagne was suddenly called away and catapulted to the tail section where she became violently attached to the ceiling, crawling around on her hands and knees, sobbing and pleading with God to set her back on her feet again. But God couldn’t hear her through the commotion.

  The aircraft broke up before it hit the water. As it plunged through the clouds its tail broke away, tore a great hole in the tourist cabin and sprayed all the passengers into the sky.

  Fat Harry was sucked from his seat and perched on a cushion of frozen air. All around him men and women were performing cartwheels and somersaults. A woman tumbled past him with her skirts blown over her head. She paddled at the air with her feet and stretched out her arms like wings. A long string of amber beads, spun from frozen droplets of urine, trailed from her legs like a spider’s thread. A naked man hung upside down with a briefcase clasped against his chest. His false teeth had been knocked from his astonished mouth and he kept pecking at them with his nose as they floated before his face. Fat Harry laughed and closed his eyes and there was darkness and then silence and then nothing more until he came melting through Charlie’s ceiling.

  61.

  It was a fast and easy death compared to the fate of Baxter, who would die in the arms of Patch Armstrong as they lay together in the bottom of a Tesco freezer.

  As the storm knocked down power lines and washed away the roads, the Mothers would find themselves increasingly isolated from the world. At first they were content to barricade the house against the rumours of rapists and raiders but gradually, with the passing of the days, they would forget their fear of bandits and hope for the sight of a search party armed with bales of emergency rations.

  The TV and radio would be dead, the phones would no longer work and the heating system would fail. There would be no lights. There would be no refrigeration. The kitchen would be a museum of impotent machines without the strength between them to brew coffee or make toast. The water that oozed from the taps would be dark and as thick as blood.

  ‘If they’re not going to help defenceless women and children, we’ve got to go out there and help ourselves,’ Patch Armstrong would announce one morning, as the Mothers huddled around a fire they’d make from the nursery furniture. ‘We’ll go out there and fetch back our own supplies. We need food and fuel and candles and soap and batteries for the radio and more blankets and pillows and God knows what else.’ She would look excited and confident, as if she were planning a camping trip.

  ‘The roads have been washed away,’ Baxter would remind everyone, as she volunteered herself for the task.

  ‘We’ll walk,’ Patch would reply boldly, clipping a rubber baby blanket over the straps of her dungarees. She would work the blanket into a hood to protect her head from the rain. ‘We’ll swim. We can’t sit here and watch our children starve.’

  So they would splash their way from the house, across the concrete perimeter that had once been a garden filled with food, to embark upon their dangerous mission. Only when they had reached the gates would they discover the full extent of the destruction The roads would be rivers of mud, blocked by trees and the wreckage of cars and fallen buildings.

  Three hundred yards from the house, exhausted cold and drowning in mud, they would be rescued by the driver of an army truck who would promise to take them as far as the nearest Shoppers Paradise™. He would tell them about the curfews, the rationing and the problems in the military hospitals.

  ‘They’ve evacuated London. Thousands and thousands killed in the flood. They say it’s worse than a war. You shouldn’t be here. You should be at one of the district camps. They’re giving out identity cards and emergency ration books. No coupons—no food. Have you had your vaccinations?’

  Patch and Baxter would shake their heads and glance at one another and wonder what he was talking about.

  ‘You need your vaccinations. They reckon there’s cholera in the camps. They’re digging graves like there’s no tomorrow.’

  The women would listen but not believe him. He only half-believed it himself. It seemed impossible, even then, that the world was coming to an end. Something would happen to save them.

  It would have to be a miracle.

  The truck would dump them a little distance from a supermarket set in a glistening lake of mud and screened by a collapsing wall of sandbags. A capsized train of supermarket trolleys lay half-submerged in the mud like the spine of a skeleton dragon.

  ‘It’s no good,’ the driver would warn them. ‘All the food belongs to the army. You’ll have to get yourselves ration books. It’s a tin of fruit, an ounce of tea and kiss goodbye to the milk and sugar.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Patch Armstrong would ask him, as she splashed down from the truck. ‘We’ve got little children to feed. They’ll have to make a special effort. We want orange juice and eggs and banana cake and SugarFrosties™ and peanut butter and chocolate pudding and all kinds of stuff.’

  ‘Good luck!’ the driver would laugh as he drove away through the gathering twilight.

  The supermarket doors would be chained and guarded by dogs and soldiers. The building itself would be dark and its windows protected by massive iron shutters.

  ‘We could bargain with the guards,’ Patch would suggest to Baxter as they crouched in the shelter of the sandbags.

  ‘We can’t bargain with anyone unless they take Visa™ or American Express™,’ Baxter would reply. ‘I forgot to bring my cheque book.’

  ‘Forget the plastic. They’ll do anything for a knee-trembler,’ Patch would declare, pulling at the rubber blanket and trying to squeeze the mud from her hair. ‘They’re soldiers.’

  Baxter would have to persuade Patch that this was a bad idea. Despite her considerable size and strength, even Patch wasn’t big enough to tackle six soldiers and their dogs.

  'I’m not going out there alone,’ Patch would snort when Baxter expressed this concern for her safety. ‘We’re doing this together. You can do that little guy and I’ll do the one standing next to him.’

  ‘I can’t do anyone!’ Baxter would be horrified. She’d peep at her miserable khaki rapists, huddled together beside an oil drum fire, and know that she was destined to starve.

  ‘Think of Victor. You’re making this sacrifice for him, it won't take long and they’ll probably settle for hand relief.’

  ‘The thought of it makes me want to be sick,’ Baxter would say as she turned to leave and struggle for home.

  ‘Do you have a better idea?’

  Baxter would already have regrets about volunteering for this crazy campaign. Nothing had been planned. Nothing had been known about the hardships that might confront them. They had no idea how they would transport their supplies even if they could find them. Finally she would convince Patch that they should, at least, search for a breach in the store’s defences before they surrendered themselves to the soldiers.

  It would be raining, a freezing black rain, as they crept past the guards towards the back of the building. And there, to Baxter’s great relief, they would find an unlocked door that would lead them into a corridor and up a flight of concrete stairs. But they would follow the stairs into the roof of the building only to find themselves trapped among the girders and cables that supported the supermarket ceiling.

  Beneath this ceiling they could imagine shelves still loaded with spinach and spuds, apples and grapefruits, fancy cakes and sliced loaves, pork chops and lamb cutlets. They wouldn’t know they were wasting their time. The supermarkets would be empty. The soldiers would be guarding them because they’d have orders to protect any building that might be used as a mortuary.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ Patch would ask in despair as she tried to stare through the darkness. She
could be debauching a soldier and be stuffing the pockets of her dungarees with slabs of hazelnut chocolate.

  ‘There must be a way down through one of the ventilators or something,’ Baxter would reply as she started to crawl across the ceiling.

  And so their hunger would drive them out across the treacherous girders in search of a loose panel among the dead lights and ventilators. They would shuffle forward, inch by inch, like terrified tightrope walkers, until they found a spyhole in the brittle plasterboard.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Patch would whisper, as they knelt down to peer into the gloom of the ransacked store. ‘If we jump from here we’re going to break…’

  These would be the last words she uttered because, at that moment, the ceiling would shatter and drop both women forty feet to their deaths in an empty ice cream freezer.

  And this was a fast and easy death compared to the fate of the rest of the Mothers who would perish with their dead children clasped in their arms, from cholera, typhoid and malnutrition.

  And these were swift and simple deaths compared to the fate of Ambrose Pangloss who would suffocate, along, in the absolute silence of the presidential lift, trapped between floors in the empty Pangloss Building. While he had the strength he would scream for help but no one would pay him any attention. He would scratch and claw at the stainless steel tomb. He would shrivel and shrink and, in the agony of dying, find himself gazing at the Gates of Heaven.

  His final words would be: ‘I can see God! He’s a Rhode Island Red!’

  62.

  Fat Harry sat up and brushed at his sleeve. He was wearing a torn silk jacket with a carnation in the buttonhole. He tried to adjust the bent flower by poking it with his thumb.