The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  A crackle of static came from the radio on the policeman’s arm.

  “I can pass a message on, of course. What’s your name, madam?”

  After a brief hesitation, she answered: “Jessica Hayward.”

  Where had that come from? Jessica Hayward was a girl she’d been at school with, now living a life of uninterrupted domesticity in Suffolk, married to a civil servant in Solar.

  “Well, I’ll let him know that you called when he returns, Miss Hayward.” She wished he wouldn’t use the name. It made him likelier to remember it.

  “That’s not necessary. I’ll contact him myself. Thank you.”

  She took one more look at the house, then shouldered her bag and turned the way she had come. As she walked, she resisted the urge to turn and check whether the officer was watching her.

  On the other side of the road, the next house along from Thorne’s had a large bay window on the first floor. At the edge of her eye, she saw a tall figure there, momentarily silhouetted in the sunlight, looking out at the street.

  TEN

  Hopper made her way back to the main road, starting to sweat under the weight of her bag, but the pain in her shoulder wasn’t enough to distract her from the wings of panic fluttering in her throat. She looked around her, then made her way back to the shop by the bus stop, asked the shopkeeper if he had a phone. He waved aside her offer of money and ushered her into a back room, where a yellowed Bakelite phone sat on a desk, half swamped by old receipts and other shop junk.

  She picked up the phone. A buzz, then a click.

  “Hello . . . South 4, please. Hopper. I think it’s 493 . . . Yes, that’s the one. Thank you.” For a few seconds she sat in the chair, her gaze roving from the half-full ashtray on the desk to the cheerful tins of mustard powder on the shelf opposite. She heard another click.

  “Hello?”

  “Mark? It’s me.” And then, because it had been a few years: “Ellie.”

  “Ellie?” Her brother sounded astonished. “Why are you in North London? I thought you were on the rig?”

  “I had to come back. Just got in this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you remember Edward Thorne? My old tutor?”

  “Of course I remember Thorne. What’s happened? Has he died or something?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “Oh Christ. Sorry, Ellie. I didn’t mean to . . . I was being flippant.”

  “It’s fine. I just came from the hospital.”

  “Are you all right?”

  She breathed deeply. “Yes. I’m fine. Just a very long day.”

  “Do you want to come for dinner?”

  “I’d . . . Only if it’s not too much trouble. Yes, I’d love to.”

  “Of course it isn’t any trouble. Will you stay the night?”

  “I can’t prey on your hospitality like that.”

  “Of course you can. What are you going to do, go to Bristol and wait for a boat straight back to the rig?”

  She sighed, and considered her few options. This was the best. “Well . . . I’d love to stay, yes.”

  “When can you be here?”

  “About an hour, I think. I’ll get a bus to you.”

  “I’ll tell Laura. See you soon.”

  Another click and the line died.

  She thanked the shopkeeper, bought a couple of unnecessary packets of cigarettes to repay him for the use of the phone, and stepped back into the street, waiting for a bus heading south. The sun’s light was dimmed by clouds, too light to promise rain. It was nearly six in the evening.

  It took two cigarettes for the bus to arrive. She climbed to the top deck, unoccupied except for a pair of children squabbling on the front bench and their wan mother. Hopper moved to the back.

  The policeman seemed not to have known Thorne was dead. Or, if he had known, he’d been under instruction not to pass the information on. And now, if anyone asked whether Thorne had had any visitors, the young man on the door would say a woman answering her description had come by, with some absurd story about a present.

  Occupied by these reflections, Hopper made her way to South 4, formerly known as Brixton.

  * * *

  The streets were heaving as she got off the bus. The old Underground station had once been the town’s meeting point; after the network had atrophied, the center of gravity had shifted upward, to the green outside the old cinema. The whole circus of human life was there: traders offering shirts too good to be new and too cheap to be honestly acquired; grocers shouting about new cultivars; touts offering tickets to the latest classical performance at the Electra. Funny how it was called the Electra, when the only reason it hosted so much classical music was the sporadic electricity shortages.

  Now—just after seven in the evening, comfortably before curfew—activity was at its peak. The station and its surroundings were heaving with salesmen, lingerers, shysters, beggars, crooks. They were trading, gambling, cheating, cursing, and gossiping, all fueled by tots of rum sold by a rackety man with a wooden cart. A colossal pink-necked hawker, completely bald and clad in a huge speckled smock, was offering anyone in earshot the chance to see a show.

  The smell of spices lingered in the air, coming from the row of little shacks huddling around the walls of the old cinema. So many jostled beside each other that even London’s stink of tar was drowned out and the scents merged into one, a single enormous aroma of a hundred foods.

  At the end of the green closest to the old Underground station were two more police—slightly more thuggish, these, with shiny black carapaces of body armor instead of the dark suit worn by the young officer outside Thorne’s home.

  There were rumors the government had repaired the key lines on the Underground a few years before and that it now ran trains once again, but only for the benefit of the security services, letting them transport officers, shields, batons, tear gas across the city in minutes.

  Hopper didn’t believe it. The network required too much technology, most of it foreign-built. Redeveloping it would have taken decades. She preferred the alternative theory: that the tunnels were still waterlogged after the great floods of the Stop, and that blind cavefish and crocodiles now made the Tube their home.

  She moved through the crowd, self-conscious. There were more people in this small square than on the whole rig. One patch of pavement was lined with men seated against the wall in various poses of agony. Several were missing limbs. Many held crude signs in faulty English. Some had children seated by them; gaunt creatures, perching by their fathers’ sides like little crows, their frames shrunken inside too-large coats, their shoes improvised from card or rags. On seeing Hopper’s well-cut jacket as she passed, her clean trainers, one man said, in a thick middle-European accent, “Please. Berlin. Please.”

  Before long others had joined him, and the children approached her too. She walked faster, feeling awkward, making her way through the crowds. Eventually she escaped between two of the stalls onto a little patch of green shaded by trees, a place for couples to linger in semidarkness. Another memory struck her, of being here with David. She dismissed it, and set off for her brother’s home.

  Colville Crescent was the place: as genteel as it sounded, an elegant bow of bricks. No throngs here, no streetside card games; just a curved progression of suffering poplars and Victorian houses. Halfway along it was the pleasant, white-painted home of Mark Hopper, security specialist to the British government, southern region. She noticed their neighbors had had new shutters installed since her last visit. A street of people still dedicated to self-improvement, even after everything.

  Mark opened the door almost as soon as she rang—he must have been lingering in the front room to preempt Laura. He hugged her awkwardly, not giving her a chance to put her bag down, then stood back and looked at her.

  “Hi, sis.”

 
“Hello, Mark.”

  He took the bag from her, then absentmindedly wedged it between the hall table and a pushchair, and straightened up. “Sorry to hear about Thorne.”

  “Thanks. It’s . . .” She stopped. The length of the day caught up with her, and impulsively she hugged him again, less awkwardly this time. They stayed like that for a few seconds, then she patted him for release.

  “You must be starving.”

  Apart from a snatched breakfast before leaving the rig, she had not eaten all day. “Yes. Oh God, yes.”

  “Great. Well, we’re ready. The kids have already had theirs and gone to bed, so it’ll just be us.”

  “Have you waited? You shouldn’t have done.” Laura would be annoyed. Hopper didn’t quite care.

  “It’s all right. Meant I got a bit more work done.”

  “I feel like I’m imposing.”

  “No imposition.”

  As he turned to stow her coat in a hall cupboard, she glanced at her brother. His face was pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes. When he had looked away from her, his face had dropped, but as he looked back, he smiled again.

  “How’s Laura?”

  “Great, thanks. She’s just back through here.” He spoke as if to remind her: Whatever you’re thinking, keep it to yourself.

  “And you?”

  “Oh, not bad.” He had already started walking toward the back of the house. “Every day a new adventure. Please do come through.”

  Hopper followed. He was so formal sometimes. Even during their childhood he had treated her with perfect manners, as though she were a houseguest arrived in his home two years late. He had got out of cars to open doors for her, and signed birthday cards best regards. For years she had suspected he disliked her, then she had seen him with a girlfriend, and realized: this was his way with almost everyone.

  The house’s basement was beautiful: a kitchen-cum-dining room running from the front to the back, with windows bowing onto the garden. The room had been fitted with the clever blinds they had these days, which used reflectors to create the impression of darkness outside. The air was cool too—air-conditioned—and the dining table flanked by shelves of new-looking books. Mark must be doing well in his work.

  Laura was in the front half of the room, the kitchen, with its iron-barred windows to the street above. She turned as Hopper entered, a serving dish in her hands, and put it back on the stove. As they hugged, Hopper wondered idly if she had been waiting to pick it up just as she came in, to show exactly how much trouble was being taken on her behalf.

  “Hello, Ellie. You well?”

  “Not bad, thank you. A long day.”

  “I’m sure. Well, make yourself at home.”

  She and Laura had never really enjoyed each other’s company. One of the few times they had spent any time together alone had been a weekend away shortly before Mark and Laura’s wedding. They had stayed in a Cotswolds hotel, a converted Georgian house run by an elderly couple. The place had been beautiful but the mood unpropitious; the owners’ only child had been badly injured in some training exercise during his conscription. They were now caring for him, a man of forty, and gaily attempting to appear unconcerned about the future despite their frailty.

  Mark had been summoned away to attend to some crisis in London. She and Laura had argued on the first night, and spent the rest of the weekend avoiding each other’s company when possible. Really it had been less an argument than the establishment of a strong difference of outlook: Laura was as keen to build and protect homes as Hopper was to flee them.

  At least there was no false bonhomie between them. They were comfortable not knowing each other’s inmost lives, and they tolerated their occasional contact with each other due to their common love of Mark. And that was something, at least. Laura really did love him. Their marriage was one of the strongest Hopper had ever seen.

  Mark had always shied away from addressing the gulf between his wife and his sister. Like a planet circled by two moons on opposite sides, he was aware only of the one in his field of view, and on the rare occasions when the two appeared in the same vista, he was surprised but not unduly bothered.

  “Please, come and sit down. Glass of wine?”

  “Thanks.”

  She sat at the dining table, picking up the bottle as Mark went to fetch another glass. Norfolk Estate, the label read. Norfolk was good for wine these days. It was definitely better than the brackish Cornish stuff. Those grapes suffered the currents of the Atlantic passing nearby and gave every glassful a tang of what the makers called “ocean bouquet” but everyone else recognized quite clearly as brine.

  She stood as Laura approached the table with a casserole dish.

  “Can I help?”

  “It’s all right. Only one or two more things to come. Sit.” Laura had clearly intended to sound less peremptory than she did, adding, “I mean, if you’d like.”

  Only once they were seated and the food—a gamey mixture of some unidentified bird, plus vegetables (“from the garden”)—had been dished out did Mark turn to Laura and say, “Ellie’s had a bit of bad news. Her old tutor, Edward Thorne, died this afternoon.”

  “How sad. Was he ill?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t know about it until today. A couple of his colleagues turned up at the rig”—had they been his colleagues? She didn’t know—“and called me back to see him, at his request.”

  “Were you close?”

  “No. We hadn’t been in contact for years.”

  “Then what did he want to see you for?” As before, the tone of Laura’s voice sharpened the question a little too far.

  Hopper smiled, not meaning it. “I think he just wanted to speak to one of his students again.” The slight lie made her flush a little. That’s not why he wanted to see you, she thought. “How are the children?”

  Laura spoke. “They’re fine. Jenny was four last week, so we threw her a little party. Tom’s still obsessed with the army, of course. Marching up and down the park.” Her whole face softened when she talked about her children.

  “And how’s your work?”

  “Fine, thanks. Nothing much to write home about. Mark’s the one who’s really been up against it lately.”

  Mark’s work was something in Security—he had never told her exactly what, beyond the vague catchall answer of counterterror. From the amount he’d told her, he could either be cleaning the place or running it. Laura had finished her national service and retrained in Solar—organizing new installations and grid management. Today she spent her days administering power generation for a swath of the southeast, although admittedly from a comfortable office in Whitehall.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mark. Sounds stressful.”

  Laura spoke again. “It’s been really excessive actually. Lot of late nights. Something big brewing with the Americans, isn’t that right?”

  “Oh, there’s always something.” Mark glanced at Laura as he smiled. Clearly he’d told her a few details too many. She nodded slightly, as if understanding the cue, and he changed the subject. “Ellie, do you know how long you’ll be staying in town?”

  “There’s a boat going back to the rig in a few days. I’ll be on it.”

  “Well, stay with us until then, obviously.” This, clearly, had been rehearsed too. There was no way Mark would have made the offer without consulting his wife first.

  Hopper took a mouthful of wine. “Thank you. I’d love to.”

  * * *

  “Here we go.”

  Standing at the sideboard, Mark rubbed his face with his free hand as he poured the whisky. Laura had gone to bed soon after supper, and Hopper felt more relaxed already. It was luxuriously dim in the living room—darker than the rig was, even with its huge industrial shutters.

  He turned, handed Hopper her glass, sat.

  “You reall
y are welcome to stay.” He looked at her along the sofa. “I mean it. Stay for a month if you like.”

  “I meant it too. I’d love to.” Well, that was a stretch, but it beat private lodgings, and she and Mark never saw each other these days. In their photos on the mantelpiece, his children were unrecognizably big. “I’m sure you’ll get tired of me before then.”

  “Ha.” He rubbed his eyes again. “Sorry for shutting off a bit about my work. It’s just a . . . a healthy habit to be in.”

  “Mark, it’s all right. I’m not offended by secrets.”

  “Thanks.” He looked relieved.

  “Anyway, I know what you government types are like. You’re not the first civil servant I’ve met today.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The two who came to pick me up from the rig. A real double act. Warwick was the woman’s name.”

  “Warwick?” There was a note of recognition in his voice, suppressed so quickly that a casual listener might have missed it.

  “Yeah. Ruth Warwick. Woman in her mid-forties, very dressed-up. Man maybe a bit older, looked a bit of a bruiser. Blake, his name was. She was chatty and he said practically nothing. Why, do you know them?”

  Mark shook his head. “I’m thinking of someone else. I’d be surprised if I did, but sometimes people switch departments.”

  “Well, they were memorable, at least.” The conversation lulled after that. Eventually she bade him good night and hauled her bag upstairs.

  The guest room was perfectly laid out, the bed sheets disconcertingly smooth after the rough linen of the rig. The last thought that occurred to her before she slept was that, despite the nature of his work, she knew very well that her brother avoided lying whenever he could, for the simple reason that he wasn’t very good at it.

  She dreamed she was with her mother, somewhere she could not name, in a chamber that was rocking to and fro. She was being told to look in a mirror. As she turned she saw, staring back at her, a skull, its sockets empty and its jaw missing, moss clinging to one cheekbone, and a little spiral amulet around its neck; and the mirror would not smash, no matter how she beat it with her cool white hands.