0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (14 page)

'Mr Jakobowski, I'm going outside. Do you want me to get you anything?'

He was sure he could hear someone moving around in the sitting room, but what could he do if the old man wasn't prepared to let anyone help him? In these strange times, who knew how people would behave?

Something electrical hummed beyond the door. It sounded as if he had a radiator running in there. People jealously hoarded their heat sources.

Who could blame them? Heat was hard to share; if you opened the circle it dissipated. He called a few more times, then gave up. In the past, when he had found anything he thought the old man might like, he would haul it home and leave it against his door. But the good-neighbour rules were no longer in force; now it was every man for himself.

Down the icy stairwell - the lift had not worked in thirteen years - to the front door, which was so frozen shut that Kallie assumed no-one had been in or out since Bennett had left with the contents of his wallet.

Deadening whiteness glared in through the window panels. He would need to find sunglasses. He had tried to pick up ski equipment from Lillywhites the last time he was in town, but - surprise, surprise - they had sold out. Only a handful of staff still manned the store, keeping up the old conventions. He had worked there himself once, bored out of his mind, waiting to seize upon the odd straggling customer who had made it in through the snow. That was back when the market was still trying to cope with the crisis, when the rich warm nations were still exporting to their poor frozen neighbours. Now that those neighbours had ceased to earn wages, there was no point in supplying them with affordable products.

The milk of human kindness had been the first thing to freeze.

Throwing his weight against the door, he shifted it wide enough to push his way through. Bayonets of ice divorced themselves from the lintel and fell about him, cutting stencils into the swathes of snow that crusted the steps. Kallie raised his face into the biting wind and looked along the street, in the direction of the city. The air stole his breath, forcing a gasp with the realisation that it was far colder than anything he had experienced before.

Snow dunes, sparkling like hills of granulated jewels, swept in great unspoilt arcs across a bleached Sahara of roads and pavements. This was a bad sign; the route had been passable the last time he ventured out. But now even those high-profile charity missions the government was fond of announcing had ceased while everyone sorted out the problems in their own back yards.

On his last trip, Kallie had seen a few heavy-traction vehicles lumbering toward town. No people, though. There were never any people. It was simply too dangerous to set out on your own. He vaguely recalled a shopping expedition with his parents, and some friends of theirs who owned a car fitted with snowtyres. His mother had bought crazy things, pointless things, floral dresses and summer blouses she would never be warm enough to wear. Anxious to be rid of their stock, the storekeepers had been bargained down to nothing. He would always remember his mother laughing in front of the mirror as she held the diaphanous chiffon material against her. Ironically, her refusal to lose hope had brought her to a protracted, painful end.

What had instilled his parents with such unreasoning optimism? Was it because they remembered a time when their world was a cacophony of movement and sound, when trees still flowered, when their vision was saturated with rainbow colours? Had they never lost sight of life's possibilities? Is that why they had allowed him to be born?

It took forty minutes to reach the deserted high street, silent but for the wind that moaned eerily around the corners of buildings like a widow at a wake. At Camden Lock the ice in the canals had expanded and crushed itself upwards into fantastic twisted geometries. Kallie pulled the fur hood of his coat tighter around his face and concentrated on placing one foot before the other. The secret was to keep moving, always keep moving.

There were no shops open at all in the high street. This was a worrying new development. Surely some signs of life still existed? In the last few years he had seen fewer and fewer people on the crystalline streets. Many had found ways of moving to the southern hemisphere.

Some had chosen to stay because they were determined to rebuild their lives in the face of the changed climate. And there were the others, the ones who had no money and no way of leaving alive.

As he trudged on, staying wide of the treacherously deep drifts, he remembered a picture he had seen once, a framed tube poster from the 1930s. The fanciful painting showed a gigantic cherub with translucent blue skin, a symbolic representation of the North Wind, perched on the roof of Oxford Circus tube station, breathing icy air down over the scurrying populace. The message was something about getting in out of the cold. Such bright pigments, such warmth, all gone now, gone forever.

The sheer white force of snow and ice blotted every other colour from the landscape.

He resolved to walk as far as the giant supermarket at the end of the road, and no further. Beyond lay the crusted ridge of permafrost that had built up in the warring crosswinds of the Euston Road. Passing near it always unnerved him; there were people in the ice, frost-blackened hands and faces staring out like half-uncovered statues. It wasn't right that they had been left there, but what could anyone do? After a few years the ice turned to stone, shifting and rupturing like the tectonic plates of the earth.

The Safeway car park was almost empty. The attendant's barrier was up, and from the lack of tyre tracks it looked like nothing had driven in or out for days. The long glass wall of the supermarket glittered with frost, and was covered in starburst cracks where the great weight of snow was slowly pushing it in, but at least the lights were still on inside, and that meant the store was open for business. Kallie had no money on him, but with luck there would be no staff to operate the tills. Many people continued to conduct a semblance of normal life, as if determined to prove that the British could remain polite in the direst of circumstances, but were easily turned from their daily tasks. Nothing could be relied upon any more, beyond the fact that the situation would worsen.

The only advantage of the new cold climate was that food stayed fresher. Just as well; supplies were sporadic and perverse. Trucks would deliver great quantities of razorblades or suntan lotion, but there would be no bread or meat. Sometimes fresh-looking food would prove to have been frozen for years, and was impossible to thaw.

The temperature inside the store was, oddly enough, too high.

Because of the value of its vast cold storage capacity, Safeway operated on its own generator but the thermostats must have become damaged in the recent storms. To be hit by the smell of rotting meat was one final cruel consumerist joke to play on the few half-starved members of the public who still ventured through its doors.

Kallie unbuttoned his coat and fought the desire to vomit as he tried to ignore the sweet, ripe smell of putrifying vegetables. It was no use trying to refreeze food that had thawed. He would have to stick to tins again.

'Hey, Kallie.' He looked along the aisle to see an old friend of his mother's, Mrs Quintero, waving her bad hand at him. She had lost three fingers to frostbite last winter, and had not had the wounds properly dressed. The black stumps of her distended knuckles suppurated through filthy bandages. He was not surprised to see her; she lived here in the store. Besides, there were only a few people who visited the outside world with any regularity these days, and one tended to see the same faces.

'The heating came back on, Kallie, can you believe it? Seventy-two degrees! Everything's gone off. The one place it needed to be cold.'

'Hasn't the professor been able to fix it?'

'Are you kidding? He hasn't a practical bone in his body. I wish you would take a look.'

'Have there been any shipments lately?' he called back, ignoring her request. If he moved any closer she would come over and hug him, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. He hated anyone touching him.

'I don't know. I've been staying in. My husband's been really sick.'

She shoved a wedge of peroxided hair from her dark-rimmed eyes. He wondered why on earth she still bothered to wear make-up. 'You heard anything?'

It was the most common question of all. Everyone expected some kind of government-authorised announcement to be made. Crisis over, it's safe to come out, that kind of thing. But it had not happened in his lifetime, and he doubted it could ever happen, or that there was still a government that could make any sort of announcement. Things had moved too far away from the norm now. How could their former lives ever be restored?

'We've had a few people call in, but nobody with any news. Been ages since we had news. A crowd of rough kids came by this week, stole the coffee vending machine, really noisy types. Of course, you don't remember when the whole world was noisy.' She looked around, too sharp, too anxious. 'It's so quiet now. The snow deadens everything, but oh! it never used to be like this.'

'Things change,' Kallie shrugged, keen to move on.

'I used to work in an office,' she continued, desperate to be understood, 'I was good at my job, and always busy, no time to stop.

And the noise! Telephones, typewriters, and buses out in the street, people calling to each other. Televisions just left on. Singing at Christmas as we left the pub. Sometimes you had to shout to be heard. Now you can almost hear yourself think. Noise was life.' She blinked and shook her head, too frightened to speak.

'I have to go, Mrs Quintero.'

'The professor's in the stockroom giving a class.' She had turned away, unwilling to share her distress. 'My two are in there with him.'

'I'll look in and say hi,' he assured her, even though he did not want to.

'There's tinned peaches in syrup on Aisle 6, and powdered eggs,' she added listlessly. 'Make sure you take some. You need to keep your strength up.'

Why? he thought. What the hell for? 'Thanks, Mrs Quintero. Take care.' He set his metal basket aside and decided to look in on the professor first. He wasn't really a professor; he just looked and sounded like everybody's idea of one. He must have been a schoolteacher at one time, because he behaved officiously and was always holding classes in the rear of the store.

The stockroom had long been cleared of produce, and folding metal chairs had been set in rows. The metal was cold to sit on, but everything wooden had long been burned. Anyone could attend the professor's lectures. Kallie was sure he would continue to make them even if no-one showed up at all. Today he was lecturing Mrs Quintero's children, and another boy he had not seen before. He stood at the back and raised his hand in silent gesture. The professor did not take kindly to being interrupted.

'Ice cores drilled from the centre of the Greenland ice-sheet should have warned us.' His dull monotone blunted the most interesting facts.

The kids looked bored, and exhibited the distracted mannerisms of the unwell. 'They proved that the climate of the earth fluctuates far more than was ever previously realised. The last ice age took very little time to occur, perhaps just a decade or two, and lasted for over a hundred thousand years. Chance plays a large part in the survival temperature of our planet. In the seas of the world there are five natural pumps that drive the great currents of the oceans. The European Sub-Polar Ocean Programme found that one of these, the Odden Feature, powers a deep cold current that helps to control the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is caused by a vast tongue of ice in the Greenland Sea.'

Kallie quietly helped himself to a tray of sausage rolls Mrs Quintero had defrosted. They tasted like putty.

'Back in February 1993, Greenland's winter ice receded due to global warming, and the tongue of ice failed to form, dissolving into pancake ice.' He paused here to write the word PANCAKE on the wall with a blue crayon. One of Mrs Quintero's boys started repeating the word aloud.

'Without a pump to drive it, the Gulf Stream, one of the sea's warmest currents, stopped almost overnight. The Gulf Stream kept Britain and northern Europe warm, and now it's gone. Then, in less than a decade, the other great pumps died, transforming the weather patterns of the world in the wink of an eye. We are in uncharted territory now. The Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution's report into the flooding of Egypt and southern china -'

But the children were all saying 'Pancake, pancake,' and the professor's lesson, always the same lesson, was wasted. They were too young to understand, anyway. They would learn soon enough.

'You were listening, weren't you, Kallie?' he asked wearily, throwing his crayon away.

'Heard it all before, prof. Nothing we can do, right?'

'Right. A friend of yours was in the other day. Tuesday.'

Kallie could not imagine why he still bothered to work out the names of individual days. Nobody else did. 'What was his name?' he asked.

'Bennett. Sat in the beverage department all day. He was very drunk when he left. I warned him not to go outside, but he wouldn't be stopped.

Wouldn't even take his jacket. Became very belligerent when challenged.'

He clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

That was it, then. No chance of getting his wallet back now. It was hard enough staying alive when you were sober, let alone drunk.

'Someone else was looking for you,' said the professor, an almost playful tone in his voice. Without asking, Kallie knew who.

'How is she?' he said finally. The professor grinned. 'Missing you, naturally. She always asks after you. She still talks about the time -'

'I know.' He cut the conversation short, uninterested in hearing an embroidered account of how, a year ago, he had saved Shari's life. 'I have to go.'

'I understand,' the professor answered with mock solemnity. 'You're a busy man. You know, I think it's time you considered moving in here with us while the generator still holds out. You get used to the smell, and it's worth it to be warm.'