The only trouble was, nothing moved. Nothing except the pigeons. For the pigeons were still there. With the conditioning of decades behind them, they would probably continue to haunt Trafalgar Square long after the last Londoner was dead.
Even as Liz and Greville glanced at the scene, the aftermath of the carnival resolved itself into a sunlit nightmare. The buses were rusty hulks, the taxis had been cannibalised for spare parts – even wheels and radiators – and some of the cars had been riddled with small-arms fire. The drunks – men, women and a few children – were no more than tattered rag-doll skeletons, lying where they had fallen, some of them with rusty guns cradled like strange talismans in arms that were only whitened bones.
And only the pigeons moved. They had been feeding (even pigeons had adapted to the new order – and a new diet) or basking or squabbling or merely strutting importantly among the buses. But the sound of the car had disturbed them; and they rose angrily and noisily up into the morning sunlight, whirling past the high effigy of Nelson, who still stood on his column and stared serenely ahead with his wide blind eyes.
A shot rang out. A chip of roadway sprang up in front of the station wagon.
‘I thought there might be one or two about!’ snapped Greville obscurely. He slammed the car into first gear and accelerated. Another bullet ricocheted plaintively where a moment ago the station wagon had been standing.
Greville drove skilfully round the overturned bus, zigzagged among the wrecked small cars and then found a clear run through Cockspur Street and the Haymarket.
Piccadilly Circus presented much the same kind of petrified desolation as Trafalgar Square, except that two massive army tanks blocked the entry to Regent Street, and Eros – the frail statue which had once seemed like an irresistible magnet for hundreds of thousands of Londoners – had been blown to glory.
Piccadilly Circus had obviously been the scene of a pitched battle. The carnage was heavier than in Trafalgar Square, and tattered remnants of uniforms still hung over the disorderly heaps of bones. The front of the London Pavilion had been shot to pieces and so had Swan and Edgars. The main entrance to the Piccadilly Tube Station was merely a pile of rubble; and large pieces of masonry lay scattered among the bones and wrecked cars that blocked the entrances to Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘Satisfied?’ demanded Greville harshly.
Liz nodded, her face white.
‘Right. Now we can get the hell out of here and go to a place where it’s still relatively pleasant to live.’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘There’s just one thing more I’d like to see … It – it means quite a lot. I want to go to the British Museum. It’s all tied up with being a little girl and feeling safe and secure in a fairly normal world … My father used to go there a lot. He took me once or twice when I was about nine … Do you think we could take a quick look?’
‘If we don’t get ambushed on the way,’ retorted Greville grimly. ‘But that’s the last stop. After that, we’re off to Norfolk.’
‘Yes,’ sighed Liz. ‘That’s the last stop.’
Greville took the car along Coventry Street. He drove slowly. There were what looked like several miniature shell-holes in the scarred roadway, and the passing of the station wagon raised clouds of fine dust from the rubble.
SIX
So far, they had not encountered any human being – unless one could include the brief sniping in Trafalgar Square – but it was still quite early in the morning; and the ‘normal’ transnormal would give the rats and cats and other nocturnal scroungers plenty of time to disperse before he ventured forth. However, as the car turned up Charing Cross Road, Liz and Greville saw their first transie of the day – an old man almost bent double under the weight of an obviously heavy sack over his shoulder.
He took one glance at the car, dropped the sack and scuttled like a frightened rabbit. Out of curiosity, Greville pulled up by the sack and inspected its contents.
‘What is it?’ asked Liz.
‘Tinned goods.’ Greville looked along the road, but the old man was nowhere to be seen. He might still be lurking in a doorway or he might have decided to abandon his spoils rather than risk being shot. There was no way of knowing.
Greville opened the rear door of the station wagon and lifted the sack. ‘It would be a pity to leave this lot, wouldn’t it?’
‘What if he comes back?’ asked Liz.
‘What if he doesn’t?’
Finally they compromised by taking half the tins – mostly fruit juices, but there was also a tin of sausages and beans – and leaving the rest in the sack on the roadway.
‘I’m surprised the rats haven’t chewed the labels off,’ said Greville. ‘The old boy must have found them in a rat-proof cellar, somewhere.’
‘Or maybe,’ said Liz, ‘they were just tucked away in an old fridge.’
Having stowed away the dozen or so tins they had acquired, they set off once more towards the British Museum. Unlike Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, St. Giles’s Circus was hardly damaged, and they crossed Oxford Street without any difficulty. Even in Great Russell Street, there was nothing to impede their progress but a very few old skeletons without even a rag of clothing in the vicinity. In life, thought Greville as he drove past the pathetic remains, they might well have been a bunch of crackpot nudists. Anything was possible in a transnormal world. But what was more probable was that the corpses had been stripped to provide clothing for the living.
Outside, the British Museum seemed completely unchanged – as if it still proposed to endure for ever. But inside, the massive building was a ruin.
In the library, the works of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Jung and Einstein – along with obscure medieval chronicles, twentieth-century text-books of nuclear physics, histories of witchcraft and political philosophies – all had been converted into a vast cosmopolis of nests for vermin. Fortunately, the nests were old, the vermin had departed to make new conquests. But their half-digested droppings of Dante and Ouida, Homer and Silas K. Hocking remained.
The British Museum stank. And the stench was of decay and death, and blind and bloody futility. But, also, there were piles of charred books and smoke blackened ceilings. Testimony, perhaps, to the empty revenge of a few transnormals on the culture that had formerly rejected them. Or perhaps merely the work of homeless and starving children who had made fires to ward off evil spirits, emboldened animals and the bitter cold of darkness – until the rats took over.
But the devastation was not confined to the library. In the Egyptian Room the massive stone statue of Rameses still stood, defying rats, beetles, transnormals and time itself. But elsewhere the destructibles had been destroyed, the combustibles had been burnt, the eatables had been eaten.
As Greville surveyed the gloomy immensity of halls and galleries, he was surprised at how much of history could be eaten – and probably not only by insects and animals. But then, he reflected grimly, life was essentially cannibalistic. Cultures and societies consumed each other, as well as animals and men …
Liz had been silent. Unnaturally silent. She merely held his hand tightly like a small child. A frightened child. No father now to reassure her, no discreet whispers of ordinary people patronising the relics of the centuries with tepid and sophisticated curiosity. Only gothic halls of desolation and the almost tangible silence of the dead that have been made to die yet again.
In the dull light, Greville suddenly noticed that Liz seemed very pale and withdrawn. For a while he had been so absorbed in the mute tragedy around him, that he had barely given her a thought. But now he suddenly realised that it would be a good thing to get her outside as quickly as possible – out into the morning sunlight.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’ve already seen too much.’
She seemed only to be able to stop herself from running with a tremendous effort. Out in the blessed sunlight once more, she heaved a great sigh of relief. And fainted on the steps.
Greville caught her. After
a minute or two her colour came back, and he gave her a bottle of beer.
‘Well, you got what you wanted. You’ve seen the sights,’ he said drily. ‘Shall we put a few miles behind us?’
She nodded. ‘I’m sorry. I thought – I thought …’
‘You thought it was all going to be sad and terribly romantic,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘Well, it isn’t. It’s mean and it’s dirty and it’s downright ugly … Now, if you aren’t going to be sick or anything like that, let’s get in the car and start moving.’
After half an hour’s driving, involving several small detours, Greville took the station wagon cautiously along Old Street and into Shoreditch, where he hit the A10. Then he picked up speed. Driving along the trunk road was easier but more dangerous, for trunk-road districts were the main hunting grounds of most ‘foreign’ scroungers.
Liz still remained withdrawn. She slumped in the passenger seat and stared listlessly at the road ahead. Greville had been a little surprised by her reactions both at the Festival Hall and at the British Museum. From what he knew of her recent existence, he would have thought that she would be able to take the disintegration of London landmarks in her stride. But then, he reflected, the city she remembered would have been a bright, imaginary city of childhood. Despite her ‘cloistered’ life in Richmond – perhaps even because of it – she had probably cherished the happy illusion that things could not be quite so bad in what was once one of the great cities of the world.
Apart from the old man who had dropped his sack and fled, they did not encounter any other transnormals in the journey across London. Greville was agreeably surprised. He did not harbour many illusions about his fellow transnormals, and knew that a well-laden car complete with provisions, guns and ammunition would be regarded by a lot of people as a prize worth taking risks for. He drove with a pistol handy and a loaded shotgun across his knees. If he could help it, he was not going to be taken by surprise.
But it was still quite early in the day and, apart from thoughts of plunder, there was no reason why any transnormals should bestir themselves. Later, no doubt, probably towards noon, London’s dwindling inhabitants would waken up and venture abroad. But by that time he would be clear of the city and on the relatively easy road to Cambridge.
As the car passed without much difficulty through Hackney, Stoke Newington and Tottenham, Greville’s spirits rose. It was a fine summer morning and, despite his alcoholic rendezvous on Chelsea Bridge the night before, he was feeling good. Soon he would be back in Ambergreave; and with Liz – well, at least he would have someone to talk to. And, if required – to use her own description – someone to screw. However, sex was a problem that had not really bothered him for some time. In a detached sort of way, he wondered if it still mattered.
‘How old are you?’ asked Liz suddenly. Her colour was coming back, and she looked as if she was beginning to revive.
Greville had to think for a moment. ‘Thirty-seven,’ he said at last. ‘Why?’
Liz smiled. ‘I wondered about the white hair.’
‘It turned overnight,’ said Greville solemnly, ‘with the shock of discovering that I had reached puberty.’
They both laughed, and the laughter seemed to disperse much of the tension that had been building up.
The ambush did not come until they had almost reached the small town of Ware, thirty miles north of London.
It came on a dull, dead suburban road where most of the gardens and privet hedges of semi-detached houses were so overgrown that the houses themselves were nearly lost to view.
It came in the shape of an old truck that suddenly hurtled out of a side-road and blocked Greville’s path. He braked, swerved and tried to drive round it. But the ambushers had chosen their spot well. The road was too narrow.
To avoid a collision, Greville stamped on the brake pedal and brought his station wagon to a halt with the front wings just touching the rear of the truck. Before he could reach for his gun, the privet hedges on either side of the road parted, displaying at least four rifles or shotguns already covering him.
A figure stepped out of the hedge on the near side. It was brandishing an old army-type revolver.
‘Don’t do anything neurotic,’ piped a thin voice, ‘unless you feel like having your face spread all over the windscreen.’
Greville kept his hands on the wheel and let out an audible sigh. Then he gazed through the open side window at the cheerfully lethal expression on the face of a boy of perhaps sixteen.
SEVEN
The ambushers came out from behind the hedges that had concealed them and stood warily round the car. The driver of the truck jumped down and joined them. Somebody lit a cigarette, somebody laughed. They seemed extraordinarily pleased with themselves. Altogether there were half a dozen of them; and none of them looked to be more than about eighteen.
The boy with the revolver was not laughing. There were tiny beads of sweat on his face, and he seemed to have trouble containing a tremendous and subtle excitement. Greville looked at his eyes – blue, piercing and at the same time oddly remote – and knew that they were the eyes of a killer.
The revolver waved negligently. ‘All right, Uncle,’ said the thin, high-pitched voice, ‘get out of the car very slowly because we’re all terribly nervous, and our fingers have a habit of twitching when we get the least bit upset.’
This injunction was met with a guffaw by one of the other boys. ‘Good old Nibs! He’s a real way-out Charlie!’
Nibs glanced at the speaker. ‘Shove it, Smiler. My sense of humour has a low sugar content.’
The words were spoken very quietly, but as he got out of the car Greville noticed that Smiler seemed to shrink visibly.
‘And now let us observe your esteemed lady companion in all her glory,’ said Nibs. He waved the revolver towards Liz. ‘Come on, now, move your hot little bottom.’
Liz and Greville exchanged glances. Neither of them could read anything at all in the other’s eyes. Liz seemed unnaturally calm. Thank God for that, thought Greville. One little wrong thing and these kids would start shooting just for the hell of it.
Liz got out of the car very slowly.
Greville turned to Nibs. ‘What do you want?’ he said evenly.
Nibs lifted the revolver fractionally until it was pointing at Greville’s stomach. ‘Say sir.’
‘Sir.’
Suddenly Nibs leaned forward, put out his free hand and slapped Greville’s face hard. ‘Say thank you.’
Greville immediately suppressed the impulse that rose in him. He knew that Nibs wanted to kill him. He thought he could get the gun, and he thought it would take all of ten seconds to break the boy in two. But there were other guns. And there was Liz.
‘Thank you – sir.’
‘That’s better, Uncle. Now go down on your knees and beg my forgiveness for asking tiresome questions.’
Greville got down on his knees, not daring to look at Liz. One of the boys sniggered. ‘That Nibs. He has style, man. Real style.’
‘I beg your forgiveness, sir,’ said Greville quietly. He was thinking: so long as this kid can show them how big he is by using me as a door-mat, he’ll let me stay alive.
‘That’s better, Uncle. We begin to understand each other. You may kiss my shoes.’
Greville kissed his shoes. Nibs lightly kicked his face for the privilege. The rest of the gang found this excruciatingly funny.
‘Stand up, Uncle. You’re overdoing it.’
Greville stood up. Nibs spat in his face.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Uncle,’ said Nibs, ‘you’re bright. But don’t let it go to your head.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Now what kind of treasures have you got in your nice little motor-car?’
‘Guns, ammunition, some shirts, woodworking tools, a crate of beer and a few books.’
Nibs slapped him again. ‘You forgot to say sir.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘It looks to me, Un
cle,’ said Nibs pleasantly, ‘as if you might have come by your little haul somewhat dishonestly. That is not nice, is it?’
‘No, sir.’
Nibs glanced at his companions and sighed. ‘My dears! What is the older generation coming to?’ There was a gust of laughter. Nibs turned to Greville once more.
‘I hope you are bitterly sorry for your sins.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Repeat after me: I am filled with remorse and penitence.’
‘I am filled with remorse and penitence, sir.’
‘I am very distressed by your recent lack of honesty, Uncle,’ said Nibs solemnly. ‘I know the temptations are great in this wicked world, but you should try to be strong. You didn’t try hard enough, did you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then you must try much harder in future – if you have a future. Meanwhile purely in the interests of justice, we shall have to confiscate this little lot. Firearms are particularly dangerous in the hands of inexperienced persons.’
Greville was beginning to understand how Nibs had become the leader of a gang of boys most of whom were older and stronger than he was. The boy, despite his weak face and effeminate voice, had brains and a literally striking personality. He also had a sure feeling for his audience. At the moment, the other boys were hanging on his every word and enjoying themselves hugely. Through Nibs, no doubt, and on the person of Greville they were wreaking vengeance for the lost security of a world that had simply gone from bad to worse throughout the major part of their young lives.
Most of them had probably been orphaned years ago, and they could only have survived by good luck and sheer singlemindedness. Greville could imagine the kind of terrifying problems with which they would have had to cope. Objectively, he could be sorry for them all. Subjectively, he felt like killing them – particularly Nibs – with his bare hands.
So far, Liz had done nothing except watch Greville make his bid for survival by passively accepting whatever form of abasement the boys cared to thrust on him. In the bright sunshine she thought his face looked tired and old. A good deal older than thirty-seven. She felt sorry for him. She felt sorry for herself too. She thought he was underestimating Nibs and his confederates. She thought they were both going to be killed anyway. She thought it would be a good idea to try to take one or two of these nasty little transies with them. All she needed from Greville was a sign. But there was no sign. Nothing at all.
Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset Page 25