The ward ran the whole length of the warehouse. It consisted of twin rows of broad beds, white against the dark gray of the floor. There must have been fifty on each side, recessed into shallow alcoves in the breeze-block walls. A few were tented off with thick, billowing plastic.
Each of the open beds held two human forms, so close they almost touched. The bodies at this end, farthest from the main entrance, were shrunken and hunched. As Hopper walked slowly along the upper gallery, toward the light windows at the other end, the bodies grew, until those nearest the main door were full, stretching the length of the bed, close to upright. Flanking each bed were two little tables, with a bucket beneath them on each side.
Many of the patients were old, the sinews of their necks standing out against the receded flesh, their white hair floating wild on the pillows as they lay staring at nothing. A few looked like children, from their size. It was quiet. Between the beds, a few taller figures moved, as bald as their host and clad in the same gray robes.
“Who pays for all this?” Hopper asked, thinking of Thorne in his hospital bed.
“City authorities. We have to take people in when they’re brought to us. If there are diseases they don’t want spread, they become our responsibility. We try and keep them comfortable as long as we can.”
“Is this everyone in the hospital?”
“No. We have people in the basement too. Worse cases.”
“How do you look after them if they’re contagious?”
“We have isolation rooms. This”—their guide gestured at the hall below—“is for those who aren’t contagious. Just incurable.”
“Why would anyone volunteer to work here?” Hopper hadn’t meant to ask the question, but their guide took no offense.
“Staff are convicts. It’s an easier life than on the Continent. Most people there would trade, given the chance. You might live longer here too, if you have immunities.”
“And if not?”
“Most last about six months.” As if he could sense their next question, he said, “I’ve been here three years. I’ve done the longest of anyone here.”
“Why did you let us in?”
“Police aren’t always right. Lots of us are in here because of the police. Undeservedly.”
“You?”
“No, I would say I deserved it.” He let the sentence hang. In the hall below, the gray robes of the orderlies swished on the flagstones.
“How long until we can leave?”
“You should wait a couple of hours. We can get you out in one of our ambulances, and drive you where you need to go. Doesn’t matter how late. Curfew doesn’t apply to us.”
Hopper’s limbs ached. She looked at her watch—it was still only just after seven in the evening. It seemed impossible. This day alone: the lawyer, the bookshop, the park, the museum, and now here.
“Where can we wait?” The long gallery they stood in was scrubbed and bare, but for another gray-clad figure sweeping the stones at the far end.
“We have a room, a bit like a priest’s hole. Although we’re not priests.”
“You could have fooled me.”
The warder-cum-doctor did not smile, the death’s-head line of his mouth undisturbed by the joke. “This way.”
* * *
They had been deposited in an ersatz hermit’s cell at the top of the building, a heavy-doored room lined with breeze blocks and unrelieved by a window. The ventilation system was an antiquated monster, noisy and ineffectual, so they left it off and sweated. The only furniture was a medicine trolley, a bookshelf, and a single bed, which they sat on with their backs to the wall.
The shelf next to Hopper had a dozen ancient, yellowed diagnostic works on it. She leafed through one. Most of the medicines listed—perhaps three-quarters of them—were crossed out in thick black pen. Next to each, various hands had written dates. Inside the front cover, someone had scrawled: November ’34. God help you.
David looked sideways at her, and spoke first: “Want to leave?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we trust him?”
“If he was going to hand us over, he would have done it when they knocked, wouldn’t he?”
“Probably.”
“All right then. I say we stay, and take their offer of a lift.”
“All right.”
“Do you think Hetty—”
“I don’t know, Ellie. I don’t know. She’s been raided before, I know that. I don’t think they ever started firing guns before.” He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, then looked at his watch, and slowly placed his hands over his eyes. “Fuck.”
Hopper reached into her pocket, feeling the bruises on her ribs once again, and offered him one of her last two cigarettes.
He took it, and bent to the light she held out. “I think my job’s gone.”
“Surely nobody saw you in the warehouse.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t stay at the Times anymore, not now they’ve taken Harry. Stupid not to see it before, really, but I was doing well, and the success turned my head.” He drew on the cigarette, still sitting against the wall, knees high, looking like a dropped puppet. “Anyway, if that little shit of an assistant of Harry’s shops me, it’s arrest I need to worry about, not my job.”
Hopper tried to think of something else to say. “I didn’t mean to get you in all this trouble.”
“Not your fault,” David said, but he didn’t look at her.
“Slightly my fault, I think.” She looked up at the strings of smoke dissipating above them.
He sighed. “You were always the one who wanted risk, Ellie. It’s what I liked about you in the first place. I’ve missed it.”
Ordinarily, she would have steered the conversation away at this point, made it clear that David’s new life was his own. Looking at him now, the streaks of gray at his temples, something in her wanted to know more. “Will you miss the work?”
“Of course.” He shook his head, grimacing. “I know what you think. You think I was an idiot for going along with it until now.” She started to protest, and he waved it away. “No, no. I know it. I don’t think you’re wrong. All I will say is, it’s hard to tell at first, when you get given a little gold chain. You put it on, you think it’s a reward. Then you get another. And then suddenly you’re wearing thirty and you can’t move your neck anymore.”
“No risk of that for me.”
He nodded. “Lucky old you.”
“I’m sure there’s lots about me you don’t miss.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He looked at her, along the side of the bed, and she felt abashed suddenly. “Do you know the funny thing? Here it is, you’ll love it: Pam and I split up because she wanted children.”
At first she thought she’d misheard him. “But, David, you want children. Or you did. That was why we broke up. Wasn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Seems like I’ve come round to your way of thinking.”
“That’s pretty big news.” She had always liked the fact that he had wanted children, even if she didn’t. He had always been the optimistic one, finding a way to the future, working out the route. And now here he was, telling her the main obstacle that had forced them apart had dissolved, that he thought there was no future worth making. “I’m very surprised.”
“You and me both. Clearly your arguments took a few years to penetrate, but they got through in the end.”
“What changed?”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s horrible here. Jesus, I’ve got a good job, or I did have. I’m lucky. But it gets worse every day.”
He looked so forlorn she couldn’t resist some encouragement. “The whole place is surviving, though, isn’t it?”
“With respect, you’ve been on a rig in the middle of the North fucking Atlantic. You don’t know.”
; He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled, scattering the thin ropes of smoke above him into mush. The gray cement of the wall behind him had leached the pink from his cheeks.
“About four years ago—soon after you left, actually—I went to a Breadbasket farm. Actually in the zone, it was, somewhere in Normandy. I was on features at the time. They’d just had their fifth crop of the year, had worked out how to squeeze an extra one in. Some genetic modification they’d done. Something clever. And they wanted to show us how well it was working.
“So we were all there, four from the Times, four from the Mail, two from the Post—this was about three months before the Post got the chop. They sent us on a bus together, along with a few press officers. Tried to keep it light, only two guards on the bus. Most of us hadn’t left London for months. It was a treat just to see a full sky for once. Stayed overnight in Portsmouth—decent hotel, lots of drink, all on Dickie Davenport. A real jolly.
“The next morning they stick us on the old ferry. Eventually we arrive, and it’s . . . nice. You know, surprisingly so. A few farmers in their smartest clothes. Chickens around the place—scrawny but, Jesus, alive. And the farmers seemed genuinely proud of what they’d done.
“The government had laid on a few people from the GM division to come along, talk us through the science. And the whole thing was . . . working. Obviously you know it’s all laid on for you, you know it’s not the whole story, but for about half an hour, I really thought . . . maybe this is how we start the road back. And I get to thinking about all those lands beyond the Breadbasket, and how maybe we’ll begin farming them one day, or how we might get those huge solar works we were promised thirty years ago, free power for everyone. Maybe there’ll be enough land to go round, so the guys up north and out west stop the bombs. Maybe even the continentals start to get back on their feet.
“Anyway, we’re heading back to the bus. The press officers are a bit behind us, talking to the farmers, probably dishing out some extra cash to thank them for such a convincing show. And there, just by the stables as we reach the bus, sitting on the ground, there’s this . . . kid. Must be no more than five years old. Half-naked. Starving. Little belly poking out. So thin you can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. We all just slow to a halt, looking at it. We must have stood there for ten seconds, but it felt like an hour. And it didn’t say anything. It looked exhausted. Like it could be eighty years old.
“And then its mother arrives round the corner, looks at us all frightened, picks the kid up sharply, takes it back indoors. She was in even worse shape herself, from the brief look we got at her. Nobody says anything. And a few seconds later our handlers come round the corner. They don’t know what we just saw.
“None of us said very much on the bus back. But it made the whole thing clear. If even the kids on the show farms look like that, firstly, where the fuck is the grain going, and secondly, what’s it like everywhere else? I know that was when things were bad, but honestly, even if it’s a lot better than that, it’s still pretty fucking awful out there.”
Between his fingers, David’s cigarette burned unnoticed. He rubbed his jaw.
“I still wrote the piece, though. Because if you don’t write the piece you get sacked. And if you’re sacked, you really can’t do anything. Then again, if you’re not doing anything anyway, you might as well get yourself sacked, but then some other bastard will have the decent job and the perks. So you don’t do anything and you hope the person who’d replace you would do it worse. Writing that piece was pretty much the end of journalism for me. Everything since then has been propaganda. Until you showed up.”
She leaned over and patted him on the shoulder, clumsily, and he gave a little nod to acknowledge the gesture, but he kept staring straight ahead, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward.
“It might be all right in the cities, Ellie, but it’s a lot worse further out. Everyone’s got a reason to hate this lot, and things aren’t getting any calmer. The army keep losing convoys, having to switch routes at the last minute, worrying about driving over fucking fortified bridges that haven’t been dangerous since the days of the collapse.
“I keep telling myself it’s going to end at some point, but then things might get even worse, because the lunatics will have won and there won’t even be a mismanaged country. But Davenport and his gang keep trying to prove it’s fine, to shove in more splints, carry on. Because they have no plan to leave. As soon as he tries to go he’ll be shot. So they’re probably just doing what I’m doing, keeping going for fear what comes after them will be worse.”
He nodded again. “No, I don’t think I could bring a child into a place like this.”
Now or never, she thought. No more lies. He doesn’t deserve them. “You nearly did, you know. We nearly did.” She had to force herself to say it.
He gave her a long look. Here it was, the last secret she’d kept from him. She met his gaze. Finally the end of their marriage was making sense to him as it did to her.
“When?”
“About six months before I left.”
He nodded slowly. “How did it end?”
“Naturally. I miscarried at eight weeks. There was only a short while when I even knew about it before it was over.”
He looked exhausted suddenly. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”
For a moment she sensed, vividly, the space in the middle of herself where the baby had been. Her muscles contracted, and she felt a matching pang in her throat. “I felt so guilty. I felt like losing the . . . baby was a sort of punishment, for not wanting it in the first place. It was my fault.”
“Why didn’t you tell me afterward?”
“Because I’d be responsible for your grief. I didn’t want you to know about it because I thought it would feel even worse for you. It was something you’d wanted for so long, and all I could have told you was that I’d lost it. So I said nothing.”
“Jesus. You’re saying that you . . . that we . . .”
“Yes.”
“Well . . . what a world, where I can hear something like that and think, That’s probably for the best. What a world.”
They sat in silence for several minutes. David’s cigarette burned out, and he left it where it was. Eventually he spoke again.
“Maybe this plan of Davenport’s, this alliance with the Americans to get the nukes—maybe it is connected somehow with the radio you found, with Thorne’s attempt to tell the Americans something. Maybe it’s a proper story you’ve dragged me into.”
“Maybe.”
“Fingers crossed I remember what one of those is, eh?” He smiled.
“What if we do find whatever it is? What if it’s enough to bring down Davenport?”
“I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong. He deserves everything he gets. But it’s a long road back to anywhere near normal.”
He stretched out along the bed. She stayed sitting at the foot, staring at the wall opposite, trying to work out why she was doing all this, what had given her this feeling that things suddenly mattered once again. But it was hard to get under the surface of her mind, especially feeling as tired as she did.
Eventually she must have slept too, sitting upright, as the next thing she knew was a soft tap at the door. She swung her legs off the bed and shook David gently by the shoulder. “Our lift is here.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Downstairs, in the evening’s brightness, an ambulance was waiting at the front of the warehouse, its squat rear wedged into the doors. Two patients had just been brought in; as the ambulance received a cursory clean, their benefactor shook Hopper’s hand, and David’s.
Hopper found herself thanking the doctor in oddly formal terms, as though stiff language could erase the unwanted intimacy created by his having rescued them.
He nodded. “I hope whatever you were looking for in our neighbor’s home is worth it.” He turned and walked
away, his long gray robe gently brushing the floor as he stalked between the beds.
Hopper and David were invited to sit on the trolleys clipped into the vehicle’s floor, and driven through streets emptying for curfew by a woman as lean and bald as their host.
David spoke first. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll find a way of getting close to Gethin. He’s the only person in Thorne’s past who we know is alive, and he’s in the photo.”
“So you’re just going to visit this Gethin man. And what will you do after you’re arrested?”
“My brother—”
“Your brother’s already bailed you out once, Ellie. And after a certain point he’ll give you up. He’s got kids. Will you promise me you’ll just go home tonight until we work it out? Together?”
“Yes. Of course. Sorry.”
They sat in silence until the ambulance was approaching Queensway. The driver pulled off the main road, meandered until they were a couple of streets from David’s house, and turned the engine off.
Hopper broke the silence. “I’ll take care, David, I promise. And when I do talk to Gethin, I’ll let you know.”
“All right. I’ll go in to the paper tomorrow as usual. They’ll already have worked out you and I were married, I know that. But short of running away, I don’t see what else I can do.”
“Good luck.”
He smiled, then turned, and without looking back hopped down to the street, pushed the large door shut behind him, and began the short walk home.
The driver spoke for the first time. “Where next?”
“Bethnal Green.”
She gave the address of Gethin’s house, the one she had memorized from the sheet Hetty had shown her, and the driver nodded and pulled away.
* * *
The journey didn’t take long. The traffic always thinned just before curfew.
She hadn’t fully worked out what she was going to do. She only knew she had to ask Gethin about the photo, and the box. Everything else—whether he would call the police, what story she would use—was fog.
The Last Day Page 22