“Do you have anything else?”
“No.” He pulled at his lip and stared at the ground. For a second he looked as though he was counting. “Unless . . .”
“Yes?” She was impatient now.
“Sometimes the editors commission an obituary. Those get stored separately.”
“So do you have one on Thorne?”
“Maybe.” David’s brow unfurrowed, and he gave her a sidelong look. “Come and meet Harry.”
THIRTEEN
“Harry” was on the top floor of the building, which was accessed by a lift. The lift itself was one of the old ones—small, noisy, the buttons ringed by grease—but it was still a rare treat. Most lifts on the rig didn’t work.
They emerged onto a corridor of ill-tended carpets, smelling of must. Thirty yards along, they reached a dark wooden door on which OBITUARIES was hand-painted in a small gold crescent. David pointed at it and smiled. He knocked, listened to a muffled response from within, and entered.
Inside the room were two desks, each a mountain of yellowing papers studded with books. The whole right-hand wall was lined with filing cabinets, themselves piled high with more paper. The lowered blinds were inadequate against the sun outside. An old radio in the corner was playing a bright piano concerto.
The man behind the larger of the two desks was perhaps sixty: tall, florid, overweight, with a thick mustache. Hopper was reminded of a walrus. He was engrossed in a document, leaning back on his chair, and halfway through a cavernous yawn. At the second desk was a man in his twenties, with dark hair and a pouting mouth, who glanced at them incuriously before returning to his book.
David spoke first. “Good afternoon, Harry.”
The older man finished his yawn and looked across from the document he was reading.
“Gamble! What a nice surprise. Come to beg for your old job back? Every chance you’ll be replacing Charlie here. Great things, Charlie’s destined for.” He gestured with his pen. Charlie did not acknowledge the joke.
“I wish. Afraid they’re keeping me pretty busy downstairs.”
“Nobody remembers obituaries,” Harry muttered. His accent was Scottish.
“This is a friend of mine, just taking a tour.”
“Come to see the most important bit of the whole paper, eh?” Harry laughed, and almost immediately started coughing. He whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket and hacked into it. The young man flashed him an unpleasant look, noticed only by Hopper.
Harry hauled himself out of his chair and moved around. Hopper saw he was wearing carpet slippers beneath his tweed suit. She shook his proffered hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“And you. Harry Markham. This is where we do it. Get ’em in each morning after conference, then me and Charlie here write them up. If you’re looking for a proper tour, I haven’t the time, I’m afraid.”
David spoke next. “Actually, Harry, there was something specific we were hoping to ask about. It wouldn’t take long.”
“I don’t have long. We’re preparing a big job on Henriksen.”
Hopper had heard the news a few days ago. Henriksen had been a junior defense minister, killed by a bomb as he opened a new factory in Birmingham.
“Ah, yes. A great loss to the nation.” It was impossible to tell sometimes whether David was joking or not.
Harry shook his head. “Do they have any idea who did it yet?”
“No fucking clue. Anglian nationalists, Cornish separatists, Scots ultras wanting to clear southerners out of the Highlands . . . could be anyone.”
Harry grunted. “Anyway. What was it you wanted?”
“Well, it’s a little complicated, Harry, to tell you the truth.” David let his eyes stray to the younger man, hunched over his book with a pencil behind his ear.
Harry followed his look and nodded. “Charlie, could you go and check on the day’s post, please?”
After a few seconds’ pause, Charlie levered himself sullenly from his seat and sloped out of the room, without making eye contact with any of them. They heard his footsteps along the creaking floorboards outside, and then the lift grille slamming shut behind him.
Harry cackled. “Little shit. Caught him going through my desk the other day. Doesn’t mean he’s Security, of course. Could just be a journalist. Anyway, it pays to get him out of the way if we’re going to talk about something important.”
Hopper looked at the book Charlie had been reading, a thick pencil wedged to mark his place. HENRIKSEN: A Study in Courage. It was as thick as a brick and had a picture of the minister as a young military officer on the front of it, looking heroic. “Are you sure it’s all right just to get rid of him like that?”
“Yes. By the time he’s editor, I’ll be well under. So, Davey. What are you here for?”
“Do you have anything on a man called Edward Thorne?”
“Thorne? Why, is he dead?”
“Afraid so.”
“Ridiculous. He’s only a few years older than me.”
“Still.” David wobbled his head side to side equivocally. Every so often he did something that reminded Hopper of their marriage. “Do you have anything on him?”
“I can’t remember. He fell out of favor, as far as I recall.” Harry must have seen Hopper’s disappointed expression. “Don’t worry. If we have, we’ll have kept it. Rule one: never throw anything away. We’d look pretty stupid if he was suddenly man of the month again and we’d chucked our first obit away.”
David spoke again. “Thanks, Harry. I knew you’d have something. Can you run us off a copy?”
“In two shakes.” He walked over to the filing cabinet in the corner and unlocked it. He pulled out a file and a sheaf of papers and took them over to the copying machine in the corner, a hulking monstrosity with a huge domed lid. As it began working, he turned back to them. “This won’t be everything, you understand. Have our little friends swiped the rest?”
“Looks like it.”
“This fucking place. Well, you’ve got our draft obit in here, a few of my notes, a few of the bigger stories from when he was really well known, about twenty years ago now. A bit thin, but better than nothing.” He pulled the replicated papers from the copier and handed them to David, who shoved them into the folder from downstairs and wedged them under one arm.
“Thank you.”
“Thanks, Harry.”
The older man waved his hand. “Forget it. I’ll trade your thanks in if you can help me get rid of this lad.” He jerked a thumb at the second desk. “It’s him or me, although I have a funny feeling it’s going to be me sometime soon. What’s it all about, Gamble? Thorne, I mean.”
“We’re just doing a bit of background research on him.”
Harry snorted. “Like shite.”
“Let’s put it like this,” said David. “There’s a chance you won’t get to run your obituary on him. At least this way your research won’t be going to waste.”
“I suppose not.” Harry gestured vaguely and started back to his desk, before turning. “Next time, it’ll be me asking you a favor, Davey.”
“I’m sure it will.”
David nodded at Hopper, and they turned and left the older man there, already ensconced behind his desk again. The lift was making its way back up the building as they approached it, a nasty squeal coming from some unloved metal within. Charlie shouldered his way out as the door opened, not bothering to open the grille fully, and passed them without looking up, a few yellow envelopes in his hands.
In the lift, going back down, David looked at her.
“Quite a character, eh? He remembers newspapers before they were”—he gestured around the miserable lift—“like this.”
“Are you enjoying it, David? Honestly?”
“Just a job, isn’t it? I’m simply happy to be here.” David handed her the file on Thorne, which she
jammed into her bag.
“Sure. That’s probably why you risked your job getting me information you couldn’t print.”
“Very funny.”
They reached the ground floor. He hauled at the grille, and they walked out into the lobby.
She patted her satchel with the file in it. “Don’t you want to see what’s in here?”
He shook his head. “Tell me if you find anything decent. But for the moment, it’d be safest if I showed my cousin off the premises and went back to work.”
He walked her out of the building and across the deserted car park. All the paint marking the spaces had long since washed away, and clumps of knotweed were pushing through the cracking concrete as if to insist: We are here, we are here to replace you.
They arrived at the outer gatehouse, and David stopped. “Will I see you again before you head back to the rig?”
“I don’t think so. I’m only here a few days.”
“Pity. You could have come for dinner.” There it was again, a sense that he was leaving something unsaid. “Of course, whatever you’re looking at, it could be related to the Americans. If it is, let me know.” Then he turned and walked across the concrete, back to the building and his office.
FOURTEEN
The Americans. Some eight million of them lived on the south coast, in a zone made habitable by the final spending spree of the US government. The last remnants of the New World.
During the middle phase of the Slow, the only matter worth thinking about was the question of where the planet would come to its final stop. For a short while the world’s researchers and scientists had devoted themselves almost entirely to working out which half of the planet might have a chance of survival.
The question was finally answered after six years. In Anglo-American terms, at least, the Old World would outlive the New. In the USA, a slim crescent of New England would remain just about lit by a weak sun. The rest of America would not. Even that land on the East Coast would be so close to sunset it would be impossible to farm or keep livestock alive. One’s shadow would be a hundred feet long.
As soon as these facts were known, the great migration had begun, the vast tide of humanity sweeping from the nations due to be swallowed by darkness toward those forecast to end in the light. More than expected had stayed put. The days and nights had lasted three weeks at the time, and many could not bring themselves to move from their own side—where it was currently light—into darkness halfway around the world, in the promise of eventual sun. Others could not abandon their own countries, their own infirm.
Even so, perhaps a billion people had moved. One of the chief nations making the shift—certainly the most organized—was America. In its final act of reinvention, the richest nation on Earth had ensured the country’s core would survive.
The policy of the United States of America had been one of “managed withdrawal.” The idea was simple: to sequester a small number of people, a few percent only, and move them wholesale to selected locations in the prospective warm zone.
It should never have worked. The project would not—could not—be kept secret. Those due to be left behind should have rioted, should have easily torn down the fences the protected millions were being kept behind. Luckily for the authorities, crop failures across the country had rendered much of the population incapable of effective riot. So the ships were loaded, and the ships came. And once the huge, stately containers had been emptied of passengers, they had been sunk in the Channel and helped keep the desperate flotilla from other nations out.
The millions who came from America brought with them a great deal needed for their survival—whole factories, even some of the new hydroponic works devoted to growing food without soil, suddenly so vital. They guarded the three or four southern counties they had been granted with great zeal.
It had been a matter of unwarranted pride to Britain that the United States of America had chosen Britain as the site for their last sanctuary. In fact, Britain had not been the Americans’ only harbor. Smaller groups had been sent to France, to West Africa, even one to the Middle East. They had all failed. The Middle East camp had not been heard of since the second collapse, several years after the Stop. The West African mission had ended fractiously: the last sounds heard before the feeds cut out were heavy gunfire and garbled requests for help. And the remains of the French mission had been salvaged six years in as the Continent fell apart, and brought over piecemeal from a little harbor not far from Dunkirk.
Even at the height of Britain’s self-delusion over its newfound significance, the price it exacted for its land had been substantial. The remnants of the American Navy were placed under British control. Any ships too badly damaged had been scuttled and added to the grim, treacherous shoals sealing the country in. Today, Britain’s navy was the last serious blue-water force in the world. The New World had come back, humbled, to live with the Old.
The Americans’ chief asset—the only thing, Hopper thought, that stopped Davenport invading the southern counties tomorrow—was their enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons, shipped over with great care, complete with the capacity to launch them. But they had never had a Breadbasket of their own, no great storehouse of supplies to keep them going through lean years on the mainland, and the rumors that their crops had failed for a couple of years in a row had made it even as far as the rig. They must be completely desperate if they really were considering handing the weapons over now.
And what remained of the American continent? The sunlit edge of the country—the metropolitan fringes of New England, the huge towers of New York—were frozen, waist-deep in snow. Out there, the sun was barely visible above the horizon. For some years after the Stop, there had been idle talk of gangs of survivors roaming the East Coast, but even the most implausible rumors had petered out twenty years ago.
And beyond that, in the regions facing out toward the universe rather than in toward the sun . . . nothing except thousands of miles of frozen fields and mountains and plains, interrupted by cities and towns populated by the dead.
The bus Hopper had boarded outside the Times jerked to a halt. They had reached the chicanes at the eastern end of Oxford Street, established fifteen years ago after a spate of truck bombings. Once they’d been installed, the threat had shifted elsewhere almost overnight, but nobody had removed the chicanes.
She pressed the button to stop the bus. Here would do. Thinking about the Coldside—as it was referred to on the rare occasions anyone mentioned it—upset her more than it used to. For children growing up today it had almost no meaning beyond a vague and imagined realm of freezing darkness. It had been cut from their mind’s eye, the Earth slowly becoming half a sphere. And anyone her age or older knew how the Coldside had been treated by the sunlit world, and never mentioned it at all.
These days she frequently found herself thinking of the millions—why sugar it, the billions—still in Asia, Australasia, the Americas, frozen in their homes and on the roads, facing the cold, dead starlight, their bodies frosted, perhaps hardly decayed at all, as though they might get up and move again if only exposed to the light of the sun. A colossal army of the dead, conscripted and condemned by the blind whim of the planet’s slow.
They were posed, in her imagination, halfway through a normal day: behind supermarket tills, their stiff hands still gripping the levers of cranes and fruit machines, waiting at kitchen counters by kettles full of ice. Sometimes she considered the likelier alternative—that they were congregated on roads, clustered at harbors where the darkness had overtaken them, huddled in the last places the lights had failed: community halls, gymnasiums. Anywhere the night might have been staved off for a few hours more.
Hopper never told anyone about these thoughts. She had no desire to discuss them, even though her mind was drawn there almost every day by some morbid gravity she didn’t understand. The living planet’s attention was focused on the damage it had
suffered rather than that inflicted on others. Still, she wondered how often her colleagues woke from dreams about skeins of ice spreading across their skin, about frosted gates shutting them out in the cold, about crawling through darkness toward a steel wall specially designed to poison them.
That had been tried, she’d heard: the purposeful irradiation of the land barrier to the Coldside by the remnants of the Chinese government, a limited nuclear release to defend themselves from their own people and from the huge numbers moving north from Southeast Asia. Britain’s government had relied on the cold sea, on its cliffs, and on its guns.
Hopper looked around her as she left the bus. She was only fifteen minutes from the gardens on the Embankment: it would be quiet there. As she walked south, she stayed off Kingsway. The crowd moved around her: unhappy burned faces, hurried and unaccommodating.
Up ahead, in the center of the pavement, was a Ranter. He was tall, broad-chested, and shirtless, his dark skin flaking about his face. He wore tattered trousers, no shoes, and his tangled beard ran with sweat as he berated the air. His chest was raw with sunburn.
The pedestrians had simply made a space around him, keeping their distance while simultaneously not acknowledging what it was they were avoiding. So he stood and shouted as they moved past him on either side.
She couldn’t hear the words he was bellowing. “Blood” was one, and “Christ” another, but beyond that, the pitch and ferocity of his words blocked any sense. The police tended to leave Ranters alone as more trouble than they were worth, and only intervened if they started damaging property or passersby.
Supposedly, many remained in control of their senses. The ranting—which took the form of shouting, crying, begging for a curative “scourge”—was designed as a performance. God had given up listening, so mankind must speak louder: only through performative self-harm could He be encouraged to turn His attention once again on the Earth. The whole idea made her feel sick.
Thirty years ago, the Ranters had commanded substantial numbers. In the chaos after the Stop, many of them had banded together and taken to the streets in unison, chanting and sobbing and urging the Lord to pay notice to their unworthy flesh. That was the time when the police were just one of many gangs, and the army another.
The Last Day Page 10