“It’s Roy who could organize our rescue if he wanted to,” Kay said.
Of their family members, Roy alone had flourished in the chaos, having got in on the ground floor of people-smuggling for the refugees who were better off. It was a lucrative trade. At seventy-two, he’d finally found his calling.
“True,” Cyril agreed heavily. “He has the underworld connections to mobilize a mob on command. But let’s be honest. Roy’s only interest in this property would be as a safe house for his customers.”
“Maybe we’re lucky that he hasn’t personally chucked us in the street, then,” Kay said. “At least Hayley seems to have learnt her lesson after that abortive performance art. She claims to have nostalgically returned to the ‘social distancing’ of the coronavirus outbreak, a fancy way of saying that she never leaves the house.”
Hayley had chosen the worst possible historical juncture to revive her arty ambitions from university. The piece she staged for the tent city in Regent’s Park was bound to end in tears. To illustrate “inequality,” she sat on a plush stool wolfing profiteroles as actors pretending to be refugees looked mournfully on. The actors were robbed, the profiteroles seized: far edgier theatre.
“Hey,” Kay said. “Did you see they took apart those lovely end tables and fed them to the log burner? And the kids used the charcoal afterwards to draw pictures on the sitting room wallpaper.”
“It was getting a bit faded,” Cyril said with a sigh. “Sod the wallpaper. The real problem is the plumbing. London’s sewage system is fragile enough, after all those wet-wipe and PPE fatbergs. But they don’t seem to realize what you can and can’t flush. I barely got the upstairs toilet working this afternoon, but when I sneaked down the ladder just now it was backed up with shite and overflowing again. Sorry, bab. Back to the bucket.”
“Got to feed the oldies, ya?” came from below. Having joined a contingent of local anarchists, the guests of their impromptu Airbnb hailed from multiple countries, so at least communicated with each other in English.
The retractable ladder rattled down, and their personal chef rose only the few steps required to fling the evening meal on the dusty floorboards. The lone main course was, as ever, a small mound of cornmeal mush, which might just have passed for polenta except it contained no butter, no parmesan cheese, and more fatally no salt. The plate was a piece of their wedding china: chipped and cracked but still attractive, with its cream centre, emerald border, and glint of silver on the rim.
“Don’t know why we bother with them,” came a female voice as the ladder was slammed closed again. “Food bitching to find. Waste of good ugali. Means time, Sarina get too thin.”
Once their overstaying houseguests had tromped away, Cyril whispered, “I’d enough time to get a partial charge on my phone today, because the others were mostly out—foraging, I suppose. But the electricity is bound to be cut off eventually. Our pensions no longer cover the British Gas bill, and the direct debit won’t have gone through for the last two months. They won’t be lenient forever.”
“Hurry up and check the BBC website, then!” Kay urged. “What’s the news?”
Cyril inhaled, scrolled, and sighed.
“What? How much worse can it be than yesterday?”
“They’ve rappelled up the Bank of England and bashed in the windows. It’s suspected they murdered the governor. In any case, it’s now another squat.”
The headline was of a piece. August university campuses from Cambridge to Bologna were occupied by needy arrivals, and what few courses were still offered were conducted patchily online; Hayley’s husband had long before been made redundant at UCL, as the last thing anyone had time for was linguistics. The British Library was covered with plywood, whilst the Booker was long gone, and even Sweden had dropped awarding Nobels for the last three years. The looted V&A was empty of artefacts, if full to the brim with exhibits of human desperation and ingenuity. Would that the paintings in the National Gallery had been stolen, but instead the canvases were hanging in shreds from attacks with penknives. Gaudi’s architecture in Barcelona had been vandalized into gaudy loose chippings. The stark blocks of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin had been systematically pulverized by sledgehammers, which the Germans tried to blame on neo-Nazis, but the rioting nihilists weren’t driven by any so constructive a purpose as the resurrection of the Third Reich.
“Goodness,” Kay said. “That building is a fortress. Was it Extinction!? Or the migrants?”
“Both. They’re operating in league now. And getting better organized. Funny, that: even anarchists gravitate towards order.”
“Maybe the Bank doesn’t even matter,” Kay said hopelessly. “Sterling is worthless anyway. You know”—she nodded at their supper—“this is grim enough without our kindly caretakers refusing to give us our own cutlery.”
“It’s cultural,” Cyril said, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I think by custom most of our downstairs neighbours eat with their left hands.”
They tried to maintain a semblance of civilization by sitting formally on either side of the plate, the sharp bones of their buttocks padded by quilts passed down from Kay’s grandmother. After dipping her hand in a bucket of their only once-clean water, she politely divided the mound into two portions with a forefinger, trying to give Cyril the greater amount; he was a man, and however nominally now the larger. The fare was hardly appetizing, but they were starving, and it took discipline not to fall upon the muck all at once. Instead, they always tried to draw out their mealtimes with reflective conversation, just as in the old days. Cyril lit their last candle stub, which created a cosy atmosphere, whilst helping to dim the heaps of bric-a-brac stashed under the eaves that might have “someday come in useful.”
“Back when we decided not to end it all on your eightieth,” Cyril began, “you told me that you ‘wanted to know what happened.’ You felt as if you were in the middle of all these stories, like climate change and the coronavirus and, heavens, I think at the time you even mentioned Brexit, of all things, and Donald Trump. You said that calling it quits in March of 2020 would be like returning a pile of unfinished novels to the library.”
“And you said,” she remembered, “that whenever we died, we’d always be in the middle of some unresolved historical plotline, so leaving loose ends dangling was part and parcel of mortality.”
“But I wanted to ask you something. The collapse of the pound, the soaring crime, the loss of all our savings. The flooding of New York City. The cricket-bat-wielding rampages through the British Museum. The descent of most of Europe into autocracy. Our own house occupied by strangers. Are you glad to have lived long enough to see all this? Or would you rather have opted out earlier and spared yourself? Looking back, how strong is your ‘narrative curiosity’ when the end of the book is this depressing?”
“Hmm,” Kay grunted. “I surprise myself a bit, because I’d have imagined that ‘narrative curiosity’ of mine was properly keen. But I’m not that curious. If I had it all to do over again, I think I’d accept the grand bargain you first proposed in 1991. Looking back, I think it must have been right around my eightieth birthday that everything started to go wrong. Maybe I’d rather have died in a state of innocence, or even delusion. Because I wish I’d never seen news photos of a Caravaggio sliced to ribbons and hanging from its frame. I wish I’d never seen the Houses of Parliament burnt to the ground. I wish I’d never seen the flowers in Kew Gardens trammelled and covered in human faeces. I’d love to turn back the clock to the twenty-ninth of March in 2020, toast our wonderful marriage with a glass of good cabernet, and knock back a handful of tablets to induce—well, whatever you call amnesia that allows you to forget the future. I’d have happily dozed off in our house, when it was still our house, nicely done up, where we’d conducted so many lovely evenings with dinners better than cornmeal caulking. I’d love to have left this world with no idea what awaits on the horizon, which, as I close my eyes for the last time, still looks bright.”
C
yril frowned, staring into the middle distance, which meant looking no further than the closest cobwebbed roof beam. “I may not feel the same way, and that surprises me as well. The last twenty years have been painful, but they’ve been interesting. If this descent into bedlam was going to happen anyway, then I’d prefer to have been around to see it. I don’t fancy delusion. I’ve always tried to look life square in the face.”
“Oh, you have not,” she said with a smile, leaning over to kiss his cheek.
“Of course, take the long view,” he said more cheerfully, “and we may be witnessing creative destruction. Something different and sometimes better always arises from the ashes, does it not? Look at the Renaissance.”
“True. But the Middle Ages lasted a thousand years.”
“Look at it this way, then. Mostly, we’ve led wonderful lives. We only got old enough to truly understand the Second World War once it was over, when we knew that the white hats had won. We lived through the Marshall Plan and the triumphant rise of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. We had long, useful careers. We raised three healthy children, at least one of whom turned out to be an agreeable human being. We availed ourselves of affordable labour-saving appliances. We got in on computers, and owned more than one, and then we were blessed with the internet, which however broadly misused is still a miracle. For four-fifths of our lives, technology, the alleviation of poverty, the powers of medical science—everything did nothing but improve. We’ve watched great films, read great books, and gone to great exhibitions. Before the last few years, we’ve walked the streets without fear. We’ve lived largely in a state of social order, which has made all our higher pleasures possible.
“But none of the angry young people ransacking the last of the West End theatres can say any of these things. They’ve experienced nothing but hardship and decline. They have no future, and they know it. The fundamentals of the Western world entered a fatal disequilibrium well before the rabble-rousing of Extinction! tearaways. Maybe those hooligans are just trying to get the inevitable demolition over with as fast as possible—”
“Sh-sh,” Kay said.
“Where you go?” came a female voice from the floor below.
“Got to get the plate from the oldies,” said the man who’d brought the mush. “We running low, ’cause they keep breaking. And got to empty they fucking bucket. Whoo-ee! Nothing that smell like oldie poo-poo.”
“Why you keep bothering with them shrivelly white folks?” the woman demanded. “We need the mealy-meal for the children. They stink, and they never stop running they mouths. Mumba-mumba-mumba come from the ceiling all day long.”
“Kokie, me soft lad, the queen’s spot on,” said a booming male voice in a strong Scouse accent. “Don’t make no sense, know what I’m saying? Scran’s proper tight, like. Might as well feed a boss tea to a pair of mangy dogs.”
“But they elders!” the minder protested. “They due respect!”
“Leave that guff back in the old country, mate,” the big male voice said. “Practical times call for practical measures.”
The catch on the hatch moved, and the loft ladder unfolded with a violent clatter. Kay clutched Cyril’s arm and their eyes met.
“What you gonna do, Dicky?” their minder pleaded from below. “What you gonna do?”
The man who emerged from the hatch was a massive, heavily muscled white fellow of about twenty-five they’d never seen before. He was carrying a machete. Had she downed that Seconal in 2020, it was one more image Kay would have spared herself. But at least the vision of her husband’s decapitated body didn’t burn on her retinas for more than a second or two.
11
Love Doesn’t Freeze
“There is a whole movement that advocates ‘ageing in place,’” Cyril noted.
“I’m all for it,” Kay said emphatically. “I like it here. I’ve put in loads of work on this house. The conservatory is exquisite. I’m thrilled with the trailing orchid wallpaper in the sitting room. I want us to keep our garden. I want to pour myself a second glass of red wine without having some officious matron whisk it away because it isn’t good for me.”
“There’s still the danger that I whisk it away,” Cyril said.
“Just try.”
In the end, they never put down that stonking deposit for Journey’s End. Giving the ritzy safe haven a miss was a gamble, but, as Kay observed, every decision we make in this life is a gamble, isn’t it?
Yet in the exuberant years of celebration, rejuvenation, and rebirth that followed the conclusion of the coronavirus crisis, Kay and Cyril felt abruptly at odds with the buoyant social mood. The inevitable economic slump in the immediate aftermath was later classified as creative destruction. Soon new restaurants opened and new businesses blossomed. The FTSE traced not a mere V-shape, but a J—soaring stratospherically and fattening everyone’s pension plans. The Wilkinsons felt as if they’d not been invited to the party. Oh, their own private pensions were bursting, but what good was money that they wouldn’t live to spend? First Cyril was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and on top of the disease’s universally poor prognosis the NHS diagnosed it on the late side. On the heels of this crushing news, Kay learnt that the persistent pain and weakness in her shoulder, along with muscle cramps, increasing difficulty walking, and a sudden inability to open her own marmalade jars, had been an early sign of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—or ALS.
“I’m rusty after having left St Thomas’ so many years ago,” Kay said limply at the kitchen table. “So I had to look it up. I might live another four years, but I’ll progress quickly towards paralysis. My favourite symptom: ‘inappropriate laughing or crying.’ In time, I’ll not be able to eat, or talk, or breathe without a ventilator. Maybe it’s time to source that Seconal again.”
“I have another idea,” Cyril said. Though scheduled for chemo, he hadn’t yet committed to a gruelling treatment that for a man of his advanced age would undoubtedly fail. “They’ve made massive leaps in cryogenics the last few years. None of this sticking-you-in-preservative-fluid-like-a-pickle business, but proper suspended animation. You remember that package we saw on Channel Four. They kept a hamster perfectly inert for eighteen months and then woke it up again, to run happily round its cage. What’ve we got to lose? If it turns out that at some later date we can’t be revived after all, we’re goners anyway—and set to die in the most dreadful manners imaginable. There’d still be a sliver of a chance that it works, and by the time we’re revived, pancreatic cancer and ALS are curable.”
“Sure, why not?” Kay said carelessly. So far, a death sentence had inclined her to be flip, even giddy—perhaps as a forerunner of all that inappropriate laughing or crying to come. She leant to seal their agreement with a peck. “My very own Rip Van Wilkinson.”
* * *
The fact that the outer office of Sleeping Beauties Ltd was decorated with Disney paraphernalia didn’t encourage confidence. Rather, cartoons of bunny rabbits and dwarves increased the sense that this dubious endeavour was having a laugh at the clients’ expense. Most of the exhaustive paperwork was to absolve the company of any legal liability. At least the extortionate fees didn’t make either spouse blink. Facing oblivion, these lifetime tightwads had finally registered that money had no value in and of itself, but was only a means to an end, and was therefore only valuable when you spent it. Barring the success of this kooky experiment, both a fiver and £5 million would soon be equally worthless.
“So what’s your prob?” the receptionist asked with the distinct air of not giving a monkey’s. The skinny young woman wore athletic gear to work, and she was chewing gum.
Disinclined to confide their heartache to a bored pencil pusher, Cyril said tersely, “ALS and pancreatic—”
“Yeah, we had a few of those. Pain in the arse, innit?” she said, not moving her gaze from the computer screen. “Any time limit?”
“No, the period is indefinite,” Cyril said. “As we’ve specified, we’re not to be revived until
both conditions can be alleviated by medical breakthroughs. The fees are indemnified by a trust. We sent in all the documentation.”
“Does it hurt?” Kay asked with sudden urgency. She’d been too embarrassed to ask before.
“How should I know?” the receptionist said, smack-smack.
“At least at Dignitas we’d get better service,” Cyril grumbled to Kay under his breath.
“Do we need to disrobe?” Kay asked anxiously as the girl led them to the inner sanctum.
“Puh-lease,” the receptionist said. “This is a cryogenics lab, not a naturist camp. And no offence, but I could skip looking at your wrinkly ass.”
“Oh, no offence taken,” Kay said sourly.
“Sarky, for a past-sell-by.” She seemed to mean it as a compliment.
Two capsules were open and lit from within. There was no getting round their resemblance to caskets.
“Are we supposed to simply—lie there?” Kay asked.
“What else would you do in that thing, Morris dancing?”
“You could be a bit more respectful,” Cyril said. They were both getting rattled by the disconcerting lack of ceremony.
“Look here, you lot getting cold feet?” the receptionist asked. “’Cause you’re gonna get cold feet, even if you go through with it.” She tee-heed. She’d made the joke before.
“Could you give us a moment alone, please?” Cyril requested firmly.
“A minute or two,” she said. “But if what you’re really up to is waffling on and bottling it, I got to warn you that the penalty for pulling out at this point is, like, I don’t know, a gazillion quid.”
In their brief window of privacy, Cyril kissed his wife deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and they withdrew from one another’s lips at last with the same reluctance they both remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim he’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
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