The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  “On paper, geography.” He smiled again. “But really, it’s almost all politics.”

  EIGHT

  The figure in the bed looked almost nothing like the man Hopper remembered. He looked nearer ninety than seventy-five. His hair had thinned drastically, and the fringe around the back of his head, formerly brown, was now the color of dirty snow. His arms, thin and sun-mottled, rested above the sheets, and the lines around his face had slackened. He was still tall—under the sheets his legs filled most of the bed, but they looked as thin as drainpipes. For a second she pitied him.

  He was asleep. The bed sheets covered him up to the chest—a little patch of exposed skin there made him look terribly vulnerable. He lay half-upright, propped by three enormous pillows. His chest rose and fell fractionally and irregularly, and from his arm a tube ran to a drip stand.

  She moved to the bed, to the cane chair beside it, and edged it around so she could sit next to him. Not quietly enough. He opened his eyes, and turned his head.

  “Ellen.” His voice was faltering, effortful.

  “Hello, Edward.” Hopper had been determined to stay cool, but clearly she had not yet recovered from her surprise at his appearance. She could hear the tremor in her voice.

  Thorne spoke again: “I didn’t know I was . . . as bad as all that.”

  “I was just surprised. You look fine.”

  “You never were a good liar.” He waved a hand as she started to demur once more. “I can appreciate . . . I’ve looked healthier.”

  “Have you been told what it is?”

  “The sun.” Skin cancer, then, or perhaps skin and another variety, she thought. Rates of the disease had rocketed, despite the campaign and sunblock distribution. It had probably progressed fast. A lot of drugs weren’t available these days; many were moldering in long-dead factories on the other side of the Earth, at the other end of cauterized supply chains. So many foreign scientists, pharmacists, manufacturers had been imported toward the end in an attempt to keep the industry working: not enough.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” But her voice was flat, and she wouldn’t have believed herself if she’d heard it in that tone.

  He shrugged. “There are worse fates.” He shifted a little in bed, wincing as he did so, and coughed into a shaking hand. “How’s your . . . work?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Life in the middle of the sea, they told me. Just what . . . you always wanted.”

  “Yes. Just what I wanted.” She tried to think of something to say. There was nobody else in his life she knew of. She couldn’t very well ask about his plans. All she could focus on was a little red mark on his pillow, a small bruise among the whiteness. Why was she here?

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. Only myself to blame.”

  “I suppose so.” Feeling as phony as Warwick, she tried a smile.

  There was another silence. He was staring not at her now but at the foot of the bed. “A very long time since we last spoke.”

  “Fifteen years.” She remembered his office at university: remembered leaving it for the last time, after she’d learned the truth about him. Her skin was burning at the memory.

  “You must be . . . angry with me.”

  “We all had to make choices. You made yours.” She felt furious suddenly, furious that her rage was now directed at this powerless, wizened creature too weak even to look at her.

  “I would be angry too.”

  She took a breath, swallowed hard. “You were the reason I stayed on at university, Edward. Your example. Your work. I think you probably knew that. I thought you had been fighting these people. And then I found out you were one of them. So I had to leave.” How many times had she imagined this moment, rehearsed telling him what she thought of him? None of the sentences she had thought of, prepared, were coming out now. It was too much, all at once, too garbled. He twisted away, looking out of the window.

  “Edward.” His head swiveled back to her. “Why did you send for me? Why . . .” She paused, looking at the door to the corridor, and lowering her voice. “Why did you write to me?”

  He breathed, effortfully, and twitched his eyes toward the door for a second. Hopper thought she understood his meaning: Be careful. He spoke. “I wanted . . . to apologize.”

  “Everyone you need to apologize to is dead.”

  He shook his head. “I do need to. I’m so sorry.” She saw a tear on his cheek. She looked at the little mark on the pillow. “You always wanted the truth. I remembered that about you, from the first day we met. Only the truth. That’s what I remembered about you, all these years. And I didn’t offer it.”

  He shook his head, the tendons sticking out from his receding flesh. She could see the toll it was taking on him. He was tiring himself out. How long had he been in here?

  He reached for the water at his side. She lifted it to his lips and he took a sip. A little spilled down his front. He drank again, and she put the cup back.

  “Edward . . .”

  “I’m so sorry. And not just to you. For all of it.” Christ. This was too much. She felt a tightness in her throat. Her eyes prickled.

  He swallowed, moved his lips soundlessly for a second, carried on. “Ellen. There is . . . something else.”

  She leaned closer. “Something you wanted me to see?”

  “I can’t tell you here. That’s why they brought you. They want it too.” His eyes widened, and he gestured with his head toward the door. Was he paranoid?

  “You can tell me later. You’re tired.”

  “No. There’s no time.” He sucked air into his lungs, and she heard the rattle as he coughed.

  “Edward, I’m going to fetch a doctor.” She started to get up.

  He reached out a hand to her, clutched her arm with surprising strength. “I asked for weeks, Ellen, and they only just brought you. Weeks.” He pulled at her, brought her ear down level with his mouth, and strained upward. She smelled his aroma, of old age and decay, mingled with the sickly scent of the flowers. His voice was hardly audible. “They brought you here thinking I would tell you everything, so they could listen. They are listening now.”

  His hand was digging into her arm. “Edward, stop. I’m going to get you some help.”

  But he had pulled her down to his level again, and was whispering, almost inaudible even to her, “My . . . house.” Then his head veered away, and he said, louder, “But I’m too clever for that. I haven’t told you anything. Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing.”

  He stared at her, eyes wide open, dragging small breaths into his lungs, and his head fell back onto the pillow, mouthing that final word over and over.

  NINE

  The time had fuzzed. When anyone spoke to her, the words took a little while to arrive. She kept noticing small things. A shaving cut on the doctor’s face. A fly, crawling jerkily across a window. The rhythm of the sprinklers in the garden outside.

  Nearly two hours had passed since Edward Thorne had died.

  The doctors had gone in, spent twenty minutes in the room. Then the bed had been taken out and wheeled quickly away. After another hour, the bed had been brought back, still full, but without urgency.

  There was a clock ticking somewhere, but she couldn’t see it, and she was not inclined to move her head to find it.

  She was in a little waiting area at the end of the corridor, by the window. The London sun was even warmer than she remembered. No wonder the crops were growing so fast these days. Triple harvests in a year, they apparently got. Sometimes quadruple. The Breadbasket lands, the old Low Countries and northern France, where they sent prisoners to grow food, must be working overtime.

  Warwick had stayed; her colleague Blake had gone. After a brief, muttered conference, he had folded his coat over his arm and left. Warwick seemed content to let Ho
pper sit. Why she was still here, she didn’t know.

  And now a doctor appeared in front of her. He was young and tired; young enough to have been born post-Stop, she guessed. He was speaking; Thorne’s body was ready for her to say farewell, if she wanted to. He led her into the room, saying more words, and left her alone with it.

  It was just her in here; her, and the body on the bed. It was less unsettling this time, now she knew to expect an old, old man. He had been tidied up; his eyes had been closed, his arms placed by his sides under the covers. Much tidier than the bodies on the boat.

  At the foot of the bed—she hadn’t seen before—were his medical papers. She looked around to check there was nobody watching through the glass porthole in the door, and pulled the little sheaf from the plastic holster. The front page was the basics—address, contact information, age—then came prescriptions, progress, responsiveness to treatment. And at the back, in fresh ink, the details of death.

  My house, he had said.

  She took the chart, ripped away the front page, folded it into four, and crammed it into her pocket. They wouldn’t notice the absence. He was dead; it could do them no good.

  She looked once more at the thing on the bed, shivered, and stepped away, back out into the green-lined corridor with its clean, empty smell.

  * * *

  She and Warwick were at the door, passing a tower of leaflets: nutrition deficiency, euthanasia guidance, the ubiquitous Sun Defense logo reminding the public of the risks to their skin.

  Weeks, Thorne had said he’d been in hospital. Had he really been trying to contact her all that time?

  Back in the car, Warwick turned to her.

  “Where to?”

  She hadn’t really thought about it until now. “My brother’s home, please. Brixton.”

  As the car began to move, she spoke again. “Actually, sorry, could you let me out by St. Martin’s? I should ring ahead.”

  There was no response from the driver, but he turned in the right direction as they swung out of the car park. She should have walked; it wasn’t far. Now she was trapped in the car for one last interview with Warwick.

  “Well, I must say, you’ve had quite a day, Dr. Hopper. I expect your brother will be glad to see you, whether you’re staying for the funeral or not.”

  Hopper nodded mechanically. She had no intention of letting Warwick know anything else about her brother, nor about herself.

  The route down through Soho was grubbier than Green Park. Soho Square wasn’t maintained. The only people present were a few exhausted-looking wretches scattered on the grass. On the right, eroded beyond recognition, the statue of Charles II, an unfashionably merry king presiding over an unfashionable part of town. The rest of the royals had disappeared.

  Beyond that, south through the heart of the district, there was nothing but half-open shops and a few grimy cafés. A few open doorways made their services luridly known, the bright-orange swirls notifying passersby of sex sold in shuttered upstairs rooms.

  They moved on to the Charing Cross Road and down. It was livelier here, the streets busier; as they approached Charing Cross, they passed a guided bus heading the other way. The tours were popular: it was a treat for out-of-towners to see London. There had been visitors from the American Zone too, until life there had started to become really hard. The numbers of defectors had spiked, and the border had been closed.

  Outside St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the car pulled over. Hopper turned to Warwick to say goodbye, but was preempted by another warm, bland smile.

  “Dr. Hopper, I’m so glad we could help today. Please do contact me if there’s anything more we can do.” A card had appeared in her hand, and she pressed it into Hopper’s.

  “Thank you.”

  The car glided off toward Whitehall. Hopper walked up the church steps, threw down her bag, and sat, looking out at Trafalgar Square.

  A feeling of profound disorientation swept over her. Here she was in the middle of London; eight hours ago she had been in the North Atlantic, staring at a boat full of bodies and thinking of her mother.

  She pulled from her pocket the page she had stolen—taken—from Thorne’s records, and found his address. He had lived somewhere in North 3. Hampstead.

  Why not, after all? She could go to see her brother afterward. On a whim, she found a bus, an elderly twin-decker, heading in the right direction, and boarded.

  The bus was full of tired passengers, most dressed for work, the paleness of exhaustion showing through their reddened skins. They didn’t seem like they were running one of the last great nations of the Earth.

  The few not formally dressed were more obviously poor. The mother awkwardly moving her rickety pram on three original wheels and one replacement; the sleeping man in a ragged jacket and no shirt who managed to keep the seat next to him clear as the bus filled, until finally an angular, owlish civil servant perched beside him, as far away as he could.

  She must have drifted off to sleep; the next thing she heard was the word “Hampstead,” shouted from the front, and she jerked upright, grabbed her bag, and pushed through the little throng around the doors to leave.

  As the bus pulled away, quiet descended, broken only by the ceaseless chirping of the crickets. There was a little shop across the road. The shopkeeper looked Korean, and as she picked a packet of gum from the half-empty shelves and pointed to the address on her purloined sheet for directions, she idly wondered whether his family had arrived before or after the Stop.

  The street Thorne lived on—had lived on—was luxurious. It was lined with tall redbrick houses, set back from the road behind a phalanx of hedges. The trees studding the pavement were hardy southern European strains, the sort now supplanting traditional English varieties across the country.

  Another sign of affluence: the road was fully lined with cars, beautiful makes that hadn’t been manufactured for thirty years. Private cars were rare even in wealthy areas like this one—moving ones anyway. Apart from the lightweight Tin Tigers made in the Birmingham factories, the few cars in operation ran on parts cannibalized from other machines. Passing a distinguished bottle-green old Bentley, she looked inside and noticed it had no seats.

  As she walked down the road, looking at the house numbers she passed, she read the sheet she had taken:

  Patient name: Edward Joshua Thorne

  Patient address: 74 Harlesden Road, North 3

  Date of birth: 02/05/1983

  Date of admission: 09/06/2059

  Age of patient: 76

  Reason for admission: Melanoma (SIV)

  Course of treatment:

  . . . followed by a list of drug names and doctors’ signatures. Hopper noticed the size of the doses unevenly but inexorably increasing down the page—68, 70 . . . She could see it now. There was a gap in the neighbor’s garden, and Thorne’s home jutted out in front of the house before it. It was four stories tall like its neighbors, dark redbrick, lined with creeping plants. Poking out of the roof was a round brick turret, surmounted by heavy slate.

  And then, from behind the hedge, she saw a man waiting outside the house; uniformed in the shiny beetle black of the police. Hopper’s initial instinct was to turn and walk away, until she realized how that might look. Her next instinct was to walk by, and yet instead she stopped and looked past him, up at the high windows of Thorne’s house.

  She spoke first. “Good afternoon. Excuse me.” She made as if to move past him, through the gate, until the officer drew a little closer to it, blocking her way.

  “Do you live here, madam?”

  He had the gun by his side, the standard belt of pacifiers: canisters of gas, electric baton, black carbon handcuffs. But he was young—perhaps twenty-five—and gangly. A livid red rash lined his neck above the tidemark of his collar. If his collar was too small, his jacket was a little large for him, and looked heavy in the heat
.

  “I . . . No, I’m on my way to see Dr. Thorne.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible, madam. We can’t let anyone in. Even if you were Mr. Thorne himself.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

  She spoke as persuasively as she could manage. “Please. Dr. Thorne and I are good friends. What’s happened? Is he all right?”

  He looked at the house, back to her, softened slightly. The crickets in the garden continued their monotonous vigil. “We were called out this afternoon. There’s been a burglary.”

  Another little hinge in the day, another moment Hopper had not been expecting, but one that fitted into the whole pattern of unpleasant surprises from the moment she had seen the helicopter on the rig.

  Her face must have betrayed her surprise. The policeman looked at her with a little curiosity. “Are you . . . family of Mr. Thorne?” She could feel him assessing—was she a girlfriend, a mistress?

  “Dr. Thorne. No. I just . . .” If she mentioned the hospital, he would know she was lying about wanting to visit him. “I’m just coming by to visit him. We’re friends.” The officer kept his face blank, clearly drawing his own conclusions. “Was he . . . in?”

  “No, nobody was in. Lucky we were called, really. A neighbor phoned and reported a couple of strangers making their way into the property.”

  “Do you know who they were?”

  “Not yet, madam. We’ve only just finished making the premises safe. Once that’s done we’ll start gathering evidence.”

  “Can I go in to drop something off?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. If you have something you want to give to Dr. Thorne, I’d happily pass it over once we’ve finished here.”

  She tried to come up with a mental inventory of the things in her bag that could conceivably be classed as presents for Thorne, and gave up.

  “No, that’s fine. I’ll see him another time.”