The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  ELEVEN

  Hopper woke slowly, drifting up through layers of half-consciousness and dream until eventually she was staring at the ceiling, disoriented. And then, in one shift, the shapes around her resolved themselves into the familiarity of the spare room. It was after nine. The house felt still beneath her.

  She busied herself pulling clothes out of her bag, shoved the old ones into the bottom of it. She put nothing into the cabinets or wardrobe. Even on the rig, she had lived out of her trunk for two months after her arrival. The comforting thought that it would be easier to make a hasty departure if one’s cases were already half-packed always outweighed the temporary comfort to be found in a home. In her experience, you inevitably had to leave sooner or later.

  After her mother’s death, her childhood had been a noisy mess of departures—she and Mark moving around the country with her father’s work. His work had been the constant presence in their lives.

  Widowed with two children after thirteen years of marriage, their father had thrown himself fully into his job. His compulsive labor had been a retreat of sorts—from a world that had taken his wife from him—but when Hopper looked at it now, it seemed like an advance too, a concerted effort to reshape the world in the hope that it might one day be more stable for her and her brother.

  Whatever the cause, her abiding memory of her father was of the side of his face as he stared intently at screens or documents or talked on the phone. He had seldom been unkind, but it would be deluded to claim he had not been neglectful.

  The second half of their childhood, with no mother and a workaholic father, had acted on the siblings in very different ways. Where Hopper resisted close relationships, Mark had thirsted for the stability denied to them as children. From the age of sixteen he had almost constantly had a girlfriend. Whenever a relationship ended, he would begin a new one within the month.

  It would be impolite to suggest that Laura had simply been his girlfriend at the time he was first ready to marry, but not inaccurate. Hopper wondered sometimes if Laura knew she thought this, and disliked her for it. But perhaps Laura simply thought of her sister-in-law as an unnecessarily chaotic element in an already disordered world.

  Downstairs, there was a note in the kitchen, pinned under a cereal bowl:

  Ellie—have gone to work. Laura’s had to go into town after dropping the kids at school. Here’s a spare key—we’ll be eating around eight. You’re welcome to join us, obviously. Regards, Mark

  Regards, indeed. She picked a pen from the pot and drew two thick lines under her brother’s note, then wrote a brief reply:

  I’ll be out most of the day, but sure I’ll be back tonight. If not, I’ll ring.

  Which raised the question: Out where?

  She could feel thoughts of Thorne at the gates of her brain, and realized she felt suddenly hostile to the whole mad story. Now she had slept, yesterday seemed like a fantastical storm that had swept her up and deposited her hundreds of miles from home. All she wanted to do was get back out of Britain. In a few days she could return to the rig and resume what passed for her life, studying the currents; free of responsibility, floating on the surface of things. There was no purpose in thinking about Thorne. None at all.

  * * *

  Before leaving the house, she stopped in the hall, picked up the phone, and rang the rig. That was another effect of the Slow that still surprised some older people—the curdling of the world’s time zones. Here in London, it was ten in the morning. Out at the rig, the sun was twenty degrees lower in the sky, but it would be ten o’clock there too.

  As the Slow had begun, there had been a spell of adjustment, as the old system—the twenty-four-hour clock, the world crazy-paved with time zones—frayed. The earliest months had been easy. As seconds were added to the duration of the planet’s spin, so they were added to the length of each day. A body had been set up to establish the precise rate of deceleration—in Germany, one of the old European states—and the information was communicated to the world’s nations.

  The empty time between days had been called Dead Air. At the end of each day, the planet’s televisions and radios hung suspended for a little while, until the next day. Midnight lasted twenty seconds, then thirty, then a full minute. Some countries displayed a message from the authorities; others left only static.

  Each night the Dead Air lasted a few seconds longer. Soon, the gap stretched to ten minutes, then twenty. Gradually people would wake earlier, and stare silently at their clocks, as day and light lurched further away from each other.

  Fifteen months into the Slow, the Eurotunnel crash had occurred. Britain had been adjusting its timetables daily; France had saved up the difference and made the change each week. Nobody had noticed the thirty-second discrepancy that built up toward the end of each week. The gap had contributed to a crash between a British passenger train and a French freight train that left eight hundred dead. The smash had unseated the government, led to the tunnel being sealed off, and added to the “Britain Alone” myth on which the current administration had so heavily relied.

  Her reflections were cut off by the operator. “Number, please.”

  She gave the number for the rig, then looked outside while the operator connected the call. It was overcast; thin clouds stretched across a light-gray sky, the sun bright behind them. Still no rain today, probably. The weather was as dry on the rig: the backup desalinators they kept would be working overtime.

  Harv picked up the phone. He would be sitting in Schwimmer’s office, on duty. His voice was distant, but the shade of Boston in his voice was so familiar that a little thrill of recognition went through her.

  “Hello, Hop. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “What happened with the tutor? Thorne, right?”

  “He died.”

  “Ah, shit. Were you close?” Everyone seemed to want to know that.

  “Not especially.”

  A pause. “Sorry to hear it anyway. Did you get a chance to talk to him?”

  “Not much. He seemed . . . I don’t know. Paranoid, somehow.”

  “Being Richard Davenport’s former best pal will do that to a man.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, it’s over now.”

  “How’s London?”

  “More or less the same. Bit cleaner.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well . . . yes, actually.” She told him, briefly, about her visit to Thorne’s house. At the end of it, he stayed silent until she prompted him. “What do you think?”

  “The burglary? I don’t know, Hop. Sounds like a coincidence. Maybe it was because the house was empty.”

  “It had been empty all the time he was in hospital. How would anyone know to break in the day he died?”

  “I don’t know.” He changed the subject. “So are you coming back?”

  “I’ll stay today, visit the department, then try to hop on the next supply ship. Unless they give me a helicopter back.”

  “As you deserve. We miss you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t, but Schwimmer’s inconsolable.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Hey, Hop.” He paused again. “When you come back, I’d like to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About us, I guess. I’ve missed you. It’d be nice to . . . oh, I don’t know.”

  “To what? Make it official?” She smiled.

  “Yeah. If you want to put it that way, yeah.”

  “You absolute cheese.” And then, a little concerned not to hurt his feelings, and secretly aware that the prospect rather pleased her: “Sure, Harv. I think I might like that.”

  She could hear the grin in his voice as he signed off. “Catch you in a few, Hop. Take it easy.” A click, then the smooth purr of the empty line. She hung up.

  * * *

  T
he government office that employed her to sit in the rig and study the currents was a tall concrete building south of Holborn. Her colleagues were surprised to see her; her superiors, gray and rumpled, could summon little interest in an update on her research. Work on the ocean was unfashionable; it escaped the cachet awarded to those who could squeeze an extra rotation out of a field of crops each year. Her old office was occupied by a new face, a young graduate looking into soil depletion in the northeast.

  When she got back to the lobby, the heavy wooden door to the street had been closed, and several people were waiting inside on the long benches, apparently without aim. But she did not notice these signs, and as she heaved the door open just enough to slip through, she heard a voice behind her, raised in protest, saying something urgent. But by then it was too late, she was through, and as it thudded shut behind her, she heard a click from the lock.

  In the street outside, her eyes first registered only a wall of movement. Along the middle of the road, a phalanx of people, perhaps ten across, was half walking, half marching toward the river. They were in approximate rows, which occasionally shimmered into the impression of order, before one individual sloucher slowed the whole group down and the columns fractured again.

  There were no apparent restrictions on membership: she spotted a gray-haired man who must have been seventy, two girls of eleven or twelve, and all ages between the two. They were every shape, every height, every color of skin. Their clothes were in poor condition, loosely orbiting a rough uniform of off-white shirts and trousers; many did not fit. Some had shoes: others had feet crudely bandaged. A few walked barefoot on the hot tarmac.

  Up and down the edges of the column, mounted soldiers in black, fitted with helmets and truncheons, rode at a gentle trot, and every hundred yards another soldier slouched behind the wheel of an armored car. The crowd walked without speaking; barring the shuffle of their feet, and the noise of the horses’ hooves, the street was almost silent. The doors and shutters lining the road were also shut.

  On the pavements, a few spectators were observing the crowd. Hopper approached one, a ratlike man in late middle age who wore a flat cap and a long coat, tattered at the edges.

  “Excuse me.”

  “What you want, miss?” He barely glanced at her before his eyes returned to the scene.

  “Who are these people?”

  “They’re being shipped to the Breadbasket. Off to grow your dinner.”

  “Prisoners?”

  He nodded, snorting heavily through his nose. “Yeah. They bring them all here, march them through. Happens every month.”

  “But where are they from?”

  “They’re criminals.” She saw the satisfaction with which he said it, and he repeated it, louder, as though hoping the exhausted bodies passing by might register it. “Criminals. Pris’ners, foreigners, es-cay-pees. Don’t you worry, they deserve it, I can guarantee you that. They deserve everything they get.”

  She remembered now. The ceremony was called the Winnow. It was another of Davenport’s little bits of street theatre, designed to keep people quiescent by reminding them what waited for anyone who committed a serious enough crime. She had never actually seen it before. The route through town must have changed in her absence.

  “Why do they march them through here?”

  “To show other crooks what’s coming to them.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  He grinned. “You don’t like it, you can join them. The foreigners all cheated their own people to get here. Left their families behind, most of them. And without them working away, you don’t get your food, miss. You don’t look like you refuse your bread.” He nodded before a thought struck him. “Why don’t you know about it? Where you from?”

  “I’ve been living on one of the rigs, out at sea. British rigs. I’m not an escapee.”

  “Better you’re not. Not like these people. Scum. Not even got any shoes, some of them. And they steal. Scum.” After half a minute of silence, he shuffled slowly away down the line, glancing back at her with suspicion before stopping to continue his vigil. She noticed his own shoes were falling apart, the tops and bottoms crudely bound by packing tape.

  Farther down the street, the crowd swept left around the Aldwych, toward the riverbank. Maybe some old cruise ship converted into a prison hulk would take them across the Channel from here, straight to northern Europe’s farmland.

  Or perhaps the riverside destination was another bit of theatre, and they would be loaded into lorries and taken the more sensible route down to the Newhaven crossing. Once it would have been Calais, before the port had been blown up. More government-as-performance from Davenport; another ritual hauling-up of the national drawbridge.

  The crowd had developed a knot, about thirty meters up from where she was. Two figures had fallen out of the line. She stepped off the pavement toward them. As she did, she saw another figure approaching, one of the police horses. Hopper arrived first.

  A child, a boy, had slumped to the ground. He must have been about fifteen; he was long-faced, short-haired, wearing a gray shirt several sizes too big for his skinny frame. The shirt was cinched in at the waist by a belt with an improvised hole. The skin on his face was burned and peeling.

  The other figure was an older woman—Hopper assumed his mother—who was quietly urging him back into the line. But she was even slighter than him and he was determined not to be moved. He was saying, loudly, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” again and again. He had a yellow crust at the corner of his mouth.

  Hopper addressed the older woman. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He doesn’t have medicine. He needs it. He’s not had it three days.” She sounded like she was from the Midlands.

  “What medicine?”

  “Pills for his heart. Help me lift him.”

  “Get back into the line, please.” The soldier on the horse had arrived and dismounted.

  Hopper ignored the command. “He’s ill. Where’s your medical station? Where’s the doctor for this group?”

  “We have medical facilities on the transport ship, madam. We’ll look after him there.” The soldier’s tone was flat. He barely bothered to varnish the lie. She saw, fifty meters down the road, another rider, alert in his saddle, waiting.

  “He needs treatment now. There’s a hospital nearby, up on Holborn. He should be transported now.”

  “This is a matter for us to deal with, madam.” A second horseman, equidistant on the other side, had also arrived now. The eyes of the passing crowd were all averted.

  “I just want to get him some water. He won’t make it to the ship without that. Look at him.” The boy’s lips were cracked and his eyes were unfocused. She turned to him, leaning over him for a second, and there was a brief burst of intense pain in the back of her head.

  She hardly felt herself being picked up, dragged to one side, and dropped in a shaded patch at the side of the road. She did not see the young man shoved into a stumbling walk with his mother, did not hear the horses’ hooves slowly receding on the hot tarmac, sensed nothing of the gentle breeze on her neck as she lay sprawled on the pavement, her body twisted inelegantly.

  * * *

  The first thing Hopper smelled was the tar again: strong, suddenly, prodding at her nose. Then she felt the warm, hard ground under her. Her throat was burning and dry. There was a throbbing at the back of her head, which pulsed in time with the noises she was hearing.

  Someone was speaking to her.

  “Do you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”

  She opened her eyes slowly. Too bright. She closed them again. Waves of pain were passing through her skull. She felt sick. No, wait—she was going to be sick. She leaned over, nauseous. Eventually she managed to speak.

  “What time is it?”

  The man standing at her side was young, wearing a suit, looked smar
t.

  “It’s noon.” She had been unconscious for an hour. He spoke again. “What’s your name?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Kingsway.” She pushed herself upright and looked around. She was barely a hundred meters from the entrance to her department. She had been placed in a tiny patch of shade in the lee of a skeletal kiosk. What a curious little delicacy to show someone you’d just beaten. “What happened to you?”

  Hopper struggled to remember. “There was a column, prisoners . . . Someone was struggling.”

  “So you intervened?”

  “I was just trying to get him water.”

  “I don’t know if you know this, but traditionally the Samaritan helps the guy who’s been beaten up. He doesn’t get himself beaten up in the process. Here. Drink this.”

  “Very funny.” Still, she took the canteen he offered, drank from it. Her wrist hurt from the way she’d fallen, and her jaw too, but as she touched it now, she could feel no break in her skin, though there was a lump on the back of her head.

  “You shouldn’t interrupt a Winnow. There’s nothing to be done about them.”

  “I hadn’t seen one before.”

  “How could you miss them?”

  “I’m not from here. I live on one of the Atlantic rigs.”

  “And you chose to come back? Jesus. Get out while you can.”

  He kept talking to her, making suggestions, asking if he could help, but that was the last of his comments she really focused on. She stood eventually, politely declined his offers, and made her way to a café by the old Holborn underground station. She sat, muzzy-headed, and tried to work out what to do, discreetly tidying herself in the partial plate-glass reflection and smoking a trembling cigarette.

  For a few minutes, she nearly went straight home. She would phone Warwick and arrange her transport on the next ship available. She could stay on the rig, studying the currents and the paths of the few whales left, and let this episode fade from her memory. She could still do it. This was her last chance.