Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset

by Cooper, Edmund

  Another interesting discovery was that all children were ‘R.S.-proof’ until the age of puberty. And, in fact, from puberty until about the age of twenty-five (the presumed end of growth and adolescence) the risk of R.S. was only about half as great as for the rest of the population.

  But, most curious of all, was the emerging classification of R.S. types. During the first two years the information gathered from more than a hundred and fifty thousand victims indicated that, in terms of professions and vocations, the most susceptible types were bank clerks, accountants, scientists, executives and managers of all kinds, shopkeepers, typists, dons (but not teachers!), pilots, sea captains, bus drivers, engine drivers, mathematicians, professional gamblers and bookmakers, minor politicians, watchmakers and civil servants. Spinsters, or – more accurately – virgins over the age of twenty-five were a very heavy risk: so were bachelors similarly.

  The least likely R.S. subjects were creative artists of all kinds, lunatics, political and religious fanatics, actors, dancers and entertainers, cranks, homosexuals, prostitutes, eccentrics, doctors and nurses, teachers, sportsmen, sadists, masochists and pathological animal lovers.

  Clearly, it was now a case of, ‘Do send your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.’ But stratagems of this kind were not much good if the person concerned happened to have a repressed flair for, say, mathematics.

  1973 came. And went – after another brilliant summer. The final reckoning in Britain was just under half a million R.S. victims. Added to which a secondary reaction was now apparent. The birth rate was falling, for obvious reasons; and the natural death rate was rising, for equally obvious reasons. People were beginning to be afraid to have children and, ironically, they were also indirectly killing themselves with worry. Towards the end of the year Parliament reintroduced conscription – which had been out of favour for more than a decade. However, the need this time was not for soldiers but for burial squads, bus drivers and clerical workers.

  In the autumn of 1974, having served his full term after contriving to avoid remission for good conduct by deliberately assaulting a prison officer, Matthew Greville was released from prison. He was given a rail ticket to London and the sum of eighteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence, which he had earned in his capacity as gravedigger.

  He had no home to go to, since he had long ago instructed his solicitor to sell the Chelsea residence and all it contained. There had been quite a large mortgage to pay off. Nevertheless, when all assets (including the Picasso) had been realised, the solicitor was able to deposit just over eleven thousand pounds in Greville’s account. Greville had promptly disposed of the entire amount to various charities.

  When he arrived in London, he hired a taxi and toured the city, savouring its richness and its bustle (for despite the Radiant Suicide London still managed to put on a brave face), noting the changes, the new skyscraper blocks that were still going up – and the new churches that were being built. Then he told the taxi driver to take him to Chelsea Bridge, where he got out, paid off the taxi and began to walk across.

  The dents were still there in the steelwork. He had to look carefully for them, but they were still there. They had been painted over, and two or three badly twisted metal sections had been renewed, but the hidden hieroglyphs still proclaimed the final result of life with Pauline – and, perhaps the result also of an encounter with an unknown cat.

  He stared for a while at the message that none but he could decipher. The sky was misty blue, and the sun covered all of England with the gold and ripening light of autumn. It was a perfect day. But the weather was entirely lost upon Greville. After reliving yet again the strange drive from Kingston (only three years ago, but in another kind of time) he headed for the nearest bar and proceeded to get drunk.

  He stayed drunk for three days, at the end of which time he woke up early in the morning in Hyde Park – shaking with the effects of drink and nervous tension, and remembering little of what had passed since his visit to the bridge.

  He pulled himself together and inquired the way to the nearest army recruitment centre. He had to wait an hour for it to open. The military gentlemen in charge were not filled with joy at the prospect of enlisting a jailbird and an obvious tramp. However, after some deliberation they magnanimously allowed him to volunteer for the Emergency Burial Corps. He was pathetically grateful. This was the kind of work he wanted – just as in prison. It was a public service.

  By the end of 1974, one million two hundred thousand British subjects had committed suicide.

  The first large holes in the fabric of society were becoming apparent. Transport was strained to breakdown point. It began to take as long as a week for a letter to get from London to the cities of the Industrial North. Rationing of food and fuel was reintroduced. The gas supplies were still unaffected; but shortage of coal and fuel oil and irregular deliveries was responsible for domestic electricity only being available between fixed hours. A bill for the Direction of Labour was quickly pushed through the House. It provided powers by which every male between eighteen and sixty-five could be re-directed to more vital work at a week’s notice. The Direction bill helped a little – that is to say, it delayed the inevitable and ultimate breakdown – but its main function seemed to be to enable the government, and the society it represented, to make a fairly orderly withdrawal … A withdrawal from the more complex functions of a civilised community …

  And still the Omega radiation poured invisibly, painlessly and maddeningly from the remote face of the sun. And still the scientists (now heavily depleted) struggled to find some kind of efficient protection or even immunisation. And still the R.S. rate climbed.

  In 1975 it passed the three million mark. Matthew Greville, private in the E.B.C., no longer dug graves by hand. He used a mechanical excavator. Then he operated a bulldozer to push the piles of thin plastic coffins into long communal graves.

  At the end of 1976, the year’s death roll touched ten million. Three separate emergency governments were operating autonomously in the North, the Midlands and the South. Coffins were obsolete. All manufactured materials were needed by the living.

  1977. Another glorious summer. The emergency governments had now disintegrated into eleven regional councils. Rail travel was suspended indefinitely except for fuel and food between some major cities. Typhoid fever raged in London; rioting in Edinburgh, York and Birmingham; starvation in South Lancashire and North Cheshire. Stealing, ‘desertion’ and withholding of labour became punishable by death in seven of the eleven regions … Total death roll: fifteen and a half million.

  Matthew Greville, temporary major in the London Emergency Burial Corps, was captured by slavers from the Midlands. Heavy chains were fastened round his ankles, and together with a group of other ‘foreign recruits’ he was sent down a mine in the Province of Nottingham to hew coal. Like the pit ponies with which they worked and died, the foreign recruits were kept permanently below the surface. The rations sent down to them varied according to the coal they sent up. Needless to say, the mortality rate was high.

  1978. The total death roll in what had formerly been known as the United Kingdom was estimated by the statistics section of the Second London Commune to be in the region of eight million.

  Towards the end of 1978 Matthew Greville escaped from the mine by feigning death and contriving to accept in silence a routine bayonet thrust. This was the method by which tired inspectors normally contrived to discover such attempts in their examination of the twice weekly burial cart. Greville’s wound, three inches deep, surprisingly did not pierce any vital organs. After a period of hiding, during which he endured mild fever and some starvation, he escaped from the Province of Nottingham and was almost immediately recruited by the Leicester City Volunteer Force as an unskilled farm labourer. The work was considerably easier than mining; but the food was not so good in quantity or quality. He lost weight, his hair began to turn grey, then white. But he remained alive and remarkably healthy.

  In 197
9 the Second London Commune disintegrated. So did practically all similar organisations throughout the British Isles, Europe and the entire world. Matthew Greville, one of the hundred and fifty thousand people still occupying the off-shore islands once literally described as Great Britain was a free man again – living on a hand-to-mouth basis.

  The Radiant Suicide – less selective as a result of the three preceding years of very intense Omega radiation – had taken the high and the low, the intelligent and the intellectually subnormal, the strong and the weak, the old and the young. In the end, all it had left as custodians of the future of mankind were the emotionally disturbed – the cranks, the misfits, the fanatics, the obsessionals, the geniuses, the idiots, the harmless eccentrics, the homicidal maniacs, the saints and sinners extraordinary who had never found peace or happiness or understanding in an ordinary world.

  Now there was no longer an ordinary world. The ordinary, the average, the normal – as a way of existence, as a standard of behaviour – was obsolete. There was no accepted ethic left – apart from personal survival – to which anyone could be expected to conform. All that remained was … transnormal …

  In 1980, the Omega radiation became very slightly less intense. But there were no scientists left to measure its intensity, or even to verify that the sun-spots producing it were still active.

  1980 was chaos.

  THREE

  7 July 1981 (perhaps). Two-thirty a.m. – Greville mean time. For now that the world was dying, now that there were no more calendars, newspapers, or work days, time was wonderfully subjective. You could declare every day to be Sunday, thought Greville, and every night to be New Year’s Eve … He was drunk, and he knew he was drunk, and he didn’t care a damn …

  Besides, there was an anniversary to celebrate. The liberation of Matthew Greville, sometime adman of this city. No, a double anniversary! For one must not forget the quietus of Pauline.

  Dear, dead Pauline. Likewise a prostitute, but more honest. Likewise a fellow-traveller to eternity. But some bastard had made a reservation for her on the doomsday express.

  Who was that bastard?

  Answer: Matthew Greville, the poet of the four-colour ad., the ex-extraordinary crap-shitting conman of the stockbroker belt. The Shakespeare of the glossy mag., the Goethe of the Sunday Times colour section, the da Vinci of Woman’s Own.

  But where now were the Sunday Times and Woman’s Own and the glory that was House and Garden?

  All gone into the dark …

  O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon …

  The air was warm, and the sky was a bowl of darkness leaking with a thousand stars, and the Thames still rippled like a fat serpent through the steel and concrete bones of London.

  Matthew Greville was sitting in a station wagon on Chelsea Bridge. The car’s bumper was just touching the metalwork where another car had struck it ten years before at something like eighty miles an hour. For a couple of hours now he had been indulging in the society of ghosts – and in brandy, Salignac ’71, a very fine year …

  ‘Did I ever love you, Pauline?’ he demanded loudly. ‘Did I ever give-all-ask-nothing flaming well love you?’

  The silence was an answer, accurate and immediate.

  ‘I lusted, my dear,’ he went on. ‘I lusted, you lusted, he, she and it lusted … Ashes to ashes and lust to lust – the basic philosophy of a world where we needed under-arm deodorants, breath-sweeteners, gin and rubber goods before we could sweat together in fashionable democratic joy.’

  He hiccupped. ‘Know what I’ve been doing since I gave you the final orgasm, darling?’ He lifted the bottle of brandy, tried to see how much it still contained by the dashboard light, then took another swig. ‘Promise not to laugh, and I’ll tell you.’

  The silence was not a laughing silence. The ghost was definitely sober and not at all like the living, fleshly ghost of Pauline.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he echoed, finishing off the Salignac and flinging the bottle through the open car window. ‘I’ve been digging graves – by special appointment … You know what I was like, darling. I always had to be best. And, by God, I turned out to be the best bloody gravedigger in history. Immortality at last … And do you know how I became the biggest little gravedigger of them all? I’ll tell you. I buried mankind, that’s how. I buried mankind.’ His voice broke. ‘And I want you to know, you poor dead little bitch, that killing you hurt me more than cutting coal, pulling ploughs or shoving a million bodies into the wretched earth … That’s how much you mean to me, Pauline, because you were the one that stopped me from living. And, goddammit, as if that wasn’t enough, you even stopped me from dying … Bitch … Bitch … Dear, lovely bitch!’

  Tears were rolling down his face. But Greville did not know that he was crying. For the Salignac and the darkness and the memories were too much. He had already fallen asleep. Somewhere, a dog howled; and the sound caused his hand to tighten on the shotgun that still rested across his knees. The dog howled again and was answered by a chorus of howls. Greville stirred uneasily and groaned, but he did not open his eyes. In the London of 1981 there were not many people who would have dared – drunk or sober – to go to sleep in a car with the window open.

  The passing of normal man and the emergence of transnormal man represented either a grotesque end of human development or a new and grotesque beginning. Nobody knew which. The normals, along with their normal processes of evaluation were extinct; and the transnormals didn’t seem to care about ends or beginnings – unless they were personal ends and personal beginnings.

  All the cities had stopped – like run-down clocks or mechanical toys or deserted hives. Deserted? No, not entirely deserted. For there were the transnormals – so few haunting the great urban graveyards of so many. Like children wandering round an empty mansion …

  But the transnormals were not entirely alone, for when normal man passed into history his very passing created an imbalance in the animal ecology of the planet. The death of three thousand million human beings left not only a great silence but also – as it were – a partial vacuum among living things. And the vacuum was beginning to be filled.

  In the cities the wild dogs now roamed – dogs who had survived starvation, disease, cannibalism. Dogs whose wits had been sharpened by hunger, whose civilised conditioning had evaporated almost instantly with the knowledge that man no longer existed as a dog’s best friend.

  The fancy dogs, the lap dogs, the soft dogs and all the carefully bred triumphs of canine splendour had disappeared. They were the first to die – the poodles, the pekes, the dachshunds, the Yorkshire toys. They were just not tough enough to compete. So they starved or died of grief – or were eaten by the rest.

  The sturdy and quick-witted mongrels, the big dogs, the Alsatians, the Great Danes, the boxers, the bulldogs – they survived. They survived to challenge each other. Some of them lived and hunted alone. Some of them hunted and died alone. Many of them learned to trade individualism for the security of the pack. The leaders of the pack maintained the pack law. The only reward was food: the only punishment was death.

  It was the same with cats. Except that cats found it harder to shed their individualism. Many of them continued to hunt alone. A few of them formed small groups. They were greatly outnumbered by the dogs, but they were also more ferocious, more unpredictable.

  The most numerous of all were the rats. With the withdrawal of normal man, their numbers increased phenomenally. They tended not to hunt in groups or in packs but in swarms. And a swarm of rats was enough to make dogs turn and cats retreat ingloriously to a spitting-point of safety.

  The law of the city-jungle was almost a closed circle. Almost but not quite. For the dogs hunted cats, rats and – reluctantly – each other; the cats hunted dogs, rats and – less reluctantly – each other; the rats hunted dogs, cats and – most happily – each other. But all of them hunted man. Especially at night-time when, instinctively, the animals knew they had the advantage.

 
The rats were to be feared most; for, indifferent to their own losses, their swarms would attack anyone or any living thing at any time. A determined man with a shotgun had a reasonable chance of shooting his way out of an attack by cats or dogs. But if he was cornered by a rat swarm, his best policy was to turn the gun upon himself.

  But, surprisingly, groups of transnormals – or even individuals – still continued to live and move about in the cities. Their numbers were being reduced as the numbers of predators increased. But for many transnormals, the cities were the only places they had truly known. The towers of concrete and steel, the silent streets, the vacant windows and smokeless chimneys of a once normal environment still continued to provide an illusion of security. Until the food ran out, until the water supply failed, or until the rats came …

  In the countryside the change was no less dramatic, but different. Despite the fact that Britain had been a highly industrialised country, four-fifths of the land had still been used for farming – even up till the early 1970s. But by the time the Radiant Suicide had taken its full toll, the English countryside had begun to revert rapidly.

  The wind blew fences down, and there was no one to repair them; low-lying fields became flooded, and no one cleared the ditches for drainage. Animals trampled the hedges, winter ice split and buckled the secondary roads; nettles and ferns, convolvulus and wild hops straddled the rough tracks; sturdy young trees began the slow process of converting pasture into woodland; and in the farmhouses, chimney stacks toppled, roofs caved in and ivy groped whisperingly for a hold on dusty window-panes.