Every move I made felt slow and deliberate. My mind was working at half its normal speed and maybe an eighth of the speed it had been the previous night. My previous worries felt far away and inconsequential. I knew I might be the last person on earth, that my best friend was lying dead up three flights of stairs, that I had recently partaken in a particularly wild drug binge, and that I probably wasn’t quite thinking straight, but it all seemed rather unimportant. The reaction of both my mind and body to such devastating circumstances was a resounding ‘Meh’.
My foremost thought was not about my circumstances but rather that I may have found the ideal crutch to help me survive in this desolate new world.
I wasn’t sad any more. I was hungry and a bit bored.
I went out.
It was already getting late and I didn’t want to go far, so I walked around the corner to the Royal Albert Hall.
I tried all of the entrance doors at the front, and the side doors, and the stage doors. They were all locked. I wanted to go in and look around.
The new medically-enhanced me was braver (and less inhibited) than the me of the day before, so I broke in.
It was surprisingly easy.
I broke the glass of one of the front doors, cleared the shards away, and climbed through. It was gloomy inside but not dark, and when I flicked the light switches they responded accordingly. I wandered through the halls and corridors, exploring.
I went into the dressing rooms and looked at the signatures scrawled on the walls. I went down below the building into the storage areas and basement. I went to the backstage area and into the staff offices and cloakrooms. I sat in all the best seats. I climbed to the very top of the building and looked down at the tiny stage and chairs below its giant dome. I broke into a refreshment stand and ate the overpriced snacks. I went onto the stage and sang, marvelling at how good the acoustics were and how bad my singing was. I bowed and thanked the non-existent audience for their loud applause.
When I left, I closed the door nicely behind me and propped a framed poster from the wall into the gap where I had broken the window.
Then I walked up the road to Whole Foods to get something to eat that wasn’t either protein powder or sugared cherries.
By the time I got back to Xav’s, the effects of the Tramadol were beginning to fade and, as I opened the front door, I heard the Pomeranian whining once more.
I had two choices – tell myself that the last twenty-four hours had been a nice break from reality but now I needed to get a bloody grip and think about what I was going to do next, or … pop another Tramadol and worry about that all later.
I took the Tramadol with a nice glass of organic red, ignoring the warnings on the packet about mixing the drugs with alcohol.
Sitting at the kitchen table with my Whole Foods semi-healthy dinner, my red wine, and a new-found, chemically-induced enthusiasm for life, I thought about what I could do next.
Obviously, what I should have been doing was looking for other survivors. That was what I had promised myself I would do only twenty-four hours earlier. That was the sensible thing to do and what any other ‘normal’ person would have been doing at this point in their time as (potentially) the last human alive.
But I wasn’t normal, and this wasn’t normal behaviour for me. For the first time since the outbreak of 6DM, and maybe for a long time before that even, I felt weirdly happy and content. I knew it wasn’t real, I knew it was chemically induced, I knew it wouldn’t and couldn’t last. But I just didn’t care. I was tired of being sad and lonely and scared, and if I wanted to replace human contact with drugs and ignore the plight of humanity, then that was up to me. There was literally no one to stop me.
So, I wrote a list of all the places in London that I wanted to visit.
I was quite selective.
I discounted anywhere too far away (Kew Gardens, Ally Pally, Wembley stadium), anywhere too ‘secure’ (MI5, Downing Street, Tower of London), anywhere that I would need to ride up or down in an elevator (the Shard, Sky Garden), anywhere outside or where something might be dying (all of the parks and the Aquarium) and shops, which were overwhelmingly dark and starting to become very smelly.
This left the Natural History Museum, Science Museum, National Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Library, British Museum, St Paul’s, Houses of Parliament, and Tate Britain.
The last thing I wanted to do in any of these places was trigger a secret alarm and end up in some security cage or stuck in a barred room until I died of thirst. If I was going to die, I wanted it to be because I had planned it, not by accident, so I was going to be very, very careful.
December 27th 2023
I started my tourist attraction bucket-list the next day at the Natural History Museum. Surprisingly, someone had been there before me and one of the main entrance doors had been prised open.
Inside it was silent, peaceful and awe-inspiring.
The size of the building and the exhibits it contained left me, literally, open-mouthed. I had been to the museum before but to see it in complete silence, to experience it without being surrounded by hordes of chattering children; my jaw dropped, and I gaped at its grandeur.
I happily roamed the vast building for most of the day, losing track of time and, at one point, losing myself completely in the warren of rooms on the upper floors. I committed the cardinal sin and touched multiple exhibits, multiple times. I left the well-defined visitor path and wandered through the attractions themselves, trailing my hands over dinosaur models, onto cool, old bones and through soft warm fur.
The sun came out and shone through the windows, lighting up years of exploration and archaeology and discovery and, if I were to be the last person ever to see this amazing place, then I was definitely one of the most appreciative.
I discovered that multiple people had used the open entrance before me.
In the dinosaur exhibition I found a man with his arms wrapped around a young boy. They were lying in the corner of the room facing the dinosaurs. The boy had a small trickle of dried blood coming from his nose, but the man seemed perfectly preserved, like one of the models. The boy was nestled in his father’s arms, his head laid comfortably on his chest, his eyes closed, his face peaceful. He might have been asleep. A final visit to a place they had both loved, a quick drink and vitamin pill and a cuddle that would last for ever. An ending filled with love.
In the hall housing the blue whale bones, three separate people had sat down knowing they would never stand up again.
I should have been horrified, sad and distraught. Maybe it was the Tramadol I had taken earlier, but instead of being appalled I was strangely comforted that, in the midst of all the horror of the outbreak, they had all thought to come here to die. Somewhere so beautiful, poignant and peaceful.
After the Natural History Museum, I visited one place from my list each day. Some of them were still open, some of them I broke into, and some of them had been broken into by others and I simply followed the already available route.
St Paul’s, I walked into and then left immediately. It was like a vision of hell, or some zombie film, filled to the brim with corpses. The pews were full, so people had lain down in the aisles, up the stairs, even on the altar, to commit their final sin. Embarrassingly, it hadn’t even occurred to me that this might have happened, that this famous and beautiful building would have been gifted as a place of peace to these people in their final hours.
The Houses of Parliament were completely empty. None of the politicians cared enough about the country at the end to choose it over their family, and who could blame them for that? I spent the day walking from one end of the building to the other, drinking tea in the restaurant, shouting in the debating chamber, looking into each of the private offices. I thought about defacing the offices of some of the worst MPs but didn’t. What would be the point? They would never know, and no one else would either. I felt like 6DM and their inability to protect themselves from it, despite their nefariou
s natures, was punishment enough.
In the Science Museum I explored the rocket exhibition with my grubby little hands, crawled inside the lunar module, sat in all the planes, trains and automobiles that I could, and marvelled at the wonder of it all. I tried out all the experiments, games, and hands-on exhibitions without queueing or waiting, and I played with all the toys in the gift shop and took a couple of chemistry sets with me to do at home.
I was equally hands-on at the Victoria and Albert and British Museums, opening cases and studying their contents wherever possible. Some of the exhibitions I left, knowing that once I opened the case to the twelfth-century scroll it would disintegrate to the elements in weeks; I was hungry for knowledge and experience, but not a total heathen. But I did break into some of the clothing exhibits, desperate to feel the material and weight of the garments. I tried on the Princess Diana dress, or at least I tried to try it on but couldn’t get it past my thighs. I lay in a sarcophagus, but then got freaked out that it might close with me stuck inside.
I timed my Tramadol dosage so that I was in front of great works of art in the National and Tate galleries just after popping the pills, and I gazed up at their mastery while feeling the rush of chemicals to my brain and veins. I tried very hard to appreciate their beauty for a significant amount of time but, despite the drugs, I succumbed to boredom once the chemical rapture ended. I have always been obsessed with the feel of paintings, always wanted to run my fingers over their uneven surfaces and feel the texture of the paint and the history contained therein. So I did. I touched them, feeling the surface of the canvases, the bumps, the waxiness of the paint and, here and there to my delight, a paintbrush bristle stuck deep into the thick paint of a work of genius.
The British Library was another magnificent palace of knowledge and history, and the contents should have kept me interested for days. But they didn’t. It was too sad to stay there long. Someone had Sellotaped a note to one of the front doors that read:
If you are reading this, please take care of these books they may be the only part of humanity we have left
Just one handwritten note. The last act of someone heading home to die.
I made sure all the windows and doors were closed before I left.
As the drugs in my veins increased, so did my recklessness. I went where I wanted and, despite my previous vow to avoid shops, I started to break into boutique ones that were still locked to take things I didn’t need. I was a huge, flightless magpie, immensely attracted to shiny things. I threw the new things I collected into an ever-growing pile in one of Xav’s spare rooms when I got home. I never looked at them again.
I marvelled at the way life had just … disappeared. Coffee shops still had tables outside, empty trains littered the tracks waiting for commuters who would never come, buses were parked everywhere, silent and still. Thousands of bikes were chained throughout the city, waiting to rust over the next hundred years.
I went to King’s Cross and wandered across the concourse, up and down the platforms, and onto the tracks. I stood in the middle of the main departure hall and yelled my name, listening to it bounce around the huge empty space, filling the void with its noise. I realised no one else would ever yell my name again.
The walls of the station were lined with posters and photos, even hand-painted pictures of people, moments captured from another time. From a distance I thought these were missing person posters, but there were so many, hundreds and hundreds lining the whole front wall of King’s Cross. It was only as I drew closer that I saw what they were.
There is no word to describe them, it was never invented. I suppose I would call them death notices. Pictures and words and poems and letters to those who have died. Like the wooden crosses in the graveyard, this was a testament to memory, to not wanting to forget. ‘Please remember my little girl in your prayers’, ‘For my Grandpa who lived till he was 93’, ‘For Kate, John and Billy, you were my life, wait for me’. So many, so much death, so much pain. It was so sad. Too sad.
I left quickly and took my next dose of Tramadol two hours early.
Late one afternoon, I walked to the middle of Waterloo Bridge and stood alternating between facing Westminster and facing the City. Nothing moved except the water beneath me. The whole of London was silent and still. I’ve never heard the Thames; its sound has always been obscured by the more immediate noises of London: traffic, roadworks, chatter, hubbub. The river is loud. It’s a huge body of water forced through a channel at high speed, and it roars its way along; rushing, splashing, gurgling through.
The sun set, the night approached, and for a long while I stood mesmerised by the water tumbling beneath me and by how easy it would be just to fall down into it and be carried away to …
… nowhere.
I wouldn’t go anywhere. I would sink. It would be cold and wet and I would drown under Waterloo Bridge.
I hate the cold.
I walked slowly home.
I settled into a comfortable routine.
I would visit a place of interest in the day, come home early afternoon, eat dinner, watch a movie, maybe have a dance, go in the hot tub, then fall asleep in the hammock.
All of this was accompanied by a pharmaceutical routine that allowed me to function, sleep, and experience a certain amount of happiness. I took Tramadol at set times during the day and sleeping pills at night. I tried to limit the amount of cocaine I was using to the odd sniff here and there when I was feeling particularly despondent because I found it was making me increasingly paranoid and jittery. Already, I was getting accustomed to my new regime. I no longer needed to sit down for an hour after taking Tramadol, it no longer caused a rush of warmth through my blood stream and, if I was late taking a dose, I found my hand would start to shake and my breath was harder to regulate until I popped the next pill.
I still got dressed each morning, combed my hair and put make-up on. I kept the cupboards of my home – as I now thought of it – filled with food and drink, and I made a cursory effort to keep it clean and tidy although it became a bit smelly and I did sometimes have trouble finding clean plates.
I thought I had an appropriate post-apocalyptic level of domesticity and routine and I was very happy in it. Ignoring my plight suited me just fine and, as long as I had the drugs and food and places to hang out, I think I would have bumbled along quite happily for the foreseeable future.
If the lights hadn’t gone out.
It seems ridiculous to say that I couldn’t change a lightbulb when I moved in with James but it is true. I suppose it’s the sort of thing that happens when you are on your own and then you learn how to fix it by trial and error, but I’d never been on my own so it had never happened to me, and therefore I had never learnt.
After James and I moved in together and after many trips to Ikea to furnish our house with an assortment of lights, I finally learnt how to change an (Ikea) lightbulb.
But that is about all I learnt.
James liked to organise and sort things, and I was quite happy for him to continue with that. James found the first house we rented, took charge of setting up the utilities, scheduled the bills, did the DIY, found and booked our holidays – he even did most of our shopping and cooking. And I let him get on with it.
Without knowing quite how, I found myself living in his favourite part of London, watching his TV shows, hanging out with his friends, drinking his choice of red wine, and listening to hours upon hours of Talk Sport. By the end of the first month that we lived together I was no longer vegetarian; it was just too hard to settle for gnawing on a dried-up veggie sausage when James was gorging on chicken stuffed with lemon and coriander butter.
I was still struggling to write my next novel. My heart and life might have been full, but the pages remained blank. Time spent staring at my empty notebook now felt like time wasted, time I should have been spending with James.
It became harder and harder to leave and travel to far-flung ports or to spend uncontactable days in the
middle of the Atlantic on the newest oil tanker. James missed me and I missed him. James was doing really well at work and, along with a new promotion, his social life was busy. He wanted me to be there for dinner parties with clients, he wanted to show me off. I wanted to be there for him, but turning up last-minute to work events still dressed in waterproofs and steel toe-capped boots was not the required look.
His face fell every time I told him I was going to be away for a few days, and I began to dread it when my editor called me into his office to tell me about the newest exciting liner I would be travelling with.
The final straw was the night I came back early from a trip away to find impromptu Friday after-work drinks being held in our flat. The laughter at my duffle bag and wet weather gear was good-natured and inclusive, but the comment that floated down the hallway to the bedroom after me didn’t feel quite as well meant.
‘I thought you said she was a proper journalist.’
I’d thought so too for a while.
In the end, my career change wasn’t a difficult decision to make. We needed to earn more money if we were going to afford a deposit for a mortgage. We needed to attend more events together if James was going to continue to be promoted. We wanted to spend every night together, not be apart for a week every month.
I loved James, he was my future. Maybe now, writing was my past.
Last One at the Party Page 10