got to me. Hurtling to the bathroom, I throw up the entire contents of my stomach. I throw up until my head is spinning furiously on the axle of its own emptiness. When I breathe in again, a weird, self-disgusted despair has engulfed me. It’s a despair that’s intimately connected to my Alex-dream. I don’t know how, or why. But the knowledge is rooted too deep for me to argue with.
When I come back, Frazer Melville is heaving bags out of the back door and into a grey hatchback. Everything looks different. As though this is a place I am remembering rather than seeing, a place I am looking back on from a time in the distant future. There is an invisible line across my abdomen beneath which I feel nothing. But now, above it, in the section that has nerves, a muscle clenches like a sea anemone. I spread the flat of my palm across the bare skin and I can almost feel an alien growth burgeoning like a parasite that has a knowledge I don’t possess, a brain of its own, a will.
It’s screaming no.
Chapter Fifteen
In the thrum of Norfolk traffic, banality confers invisibility. A grey hybrid Nissan with a small pseudo-family inside it, a middle-aged patriarch at the wheel, heeding the speed limit and heading for London via the not-so-scenic route: we could be anyone. Which effectively and reassuringly makes us no one. To our left, a sour, metallic sea; to our right, the dun of ploughed agricultural land, interrupted by a sporadic urban sprawl of industrial zones, caravan parks, office blocks, and food outlets advertising coffee, hot dogs, Coca-Cola and internet access. I’ve programmed the sat-nav to guide us along minor roads to Great Yarmouth, then down the coast past Lowestoft, Aldeburgh and Felixstowe, and west towards Stadium Island parallel to the Thames estuary. With a psychotic teenager to factor into the mix, there’s no telling how our unexpected road trip might play out, but mercifully Bethany has colluded in our escape so far. When Frazer Melville stopped at an anonymous service station for supplies, including the jumbo pack of popcorn she insisted on, she slipped into the toilets with a fistful of make-up and emerged as a darkly whorish Goth. No one gave her, or us, a second glance. So far so good. But I won’t make the mistake of trusting her. Sprawled on the back seat confetti’d with exploded caramel grains, her eyes flitting to and fro, her shaved head now sprouting a ghostly helmet of stubble, she resembles a chained beast awaiting its glory moment. Occasionally she reads out a billboard advertisement in a cracked Marge Simpson voice (’Need a loan? Call 0870-101IOI now for a free consultation. Pagoda Emporium, all-you-can-eat breakfast!’). But otherwise it’s a silent drive. We’re all cocooned in our disparate thoughts.
I’m finding no comfort in mine. When I roll the window down, there is a fetid smell, as though the moon has rotted and exhaled a candid lunar foulness across the ocean. It feeds my unease and reminds me — more than I care to be reminded — that an island is a prison. If we did somehow make it to safety, what kind of safety might that be? How does a paralysed woman go about surviving in an overheated, flood-swamped, ransacked world with wrecked communication, diminished resources, and no readily available supplies of food? Will we be looting supermarkets for bottled water, sugar and canned sardines? Planting cabbages? If we require guns, will we know how to fire them, and at whom? Perhaps, deep down, if I’ve assumed anything, it is that the disaster won’t happen. Or that if it does, we’ll die, quietly and efficiently and without pain, via the application of an inner delete button which permits us to be here one second and gone the next. Until now, the thought of my own demise hasn’t scared me — perhaps because I have already kissed death long and hard enough to feel a sick intimacy. But now, with the spectre of catastrophe massing behind the stacked clouds, I discover I am not ready to kiss it again. Apart from anything else, I have a healthy fear of pain.
‘What kind of people live on these Planetarian settlements?’ I ask Frazer Melville in an undertone. I have been trying to picture such a place, but all I can conjure are the images I have seen in magazines: humped rows of solar-panelled eco-shelters, wind turbines, beet and hemp fields, fish-farms, indoor vines and muddy toddlers in wellington boots. Beyond that, and my acquaintance with Harish Modak’s pessimistic assessment of
‘Like Harish said. Farmers, doctors, engineers,’ replies Frazer Melville, his eyes fixed on the road. I envy him something to focus on. ‘The people you’d need.’
‘Physicists, palaeontologists, pessimistic old farts, gay climat-ologists, fucked-up shrinks,’ Bethany offers from the back seat. ‘And teenagers. For breeding purposes, right?’
I should probably cry at this point, but I find myself doing the opposite. If a little hysterically.
‘I visited one in Canada once,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘You have to get into a whole new way of thinking.’
‘In a good way or a bad way?’
He shrugs. ‘In the only way.’ He glances at the sat-nav. ‘We’ll be at the stadium in two hours.’ His face is rigid with concentration.
‘Injured at work?’ enquires Marge Simpson. ‘What’s your case worth? Call now and talk to an expert. Office Sense: financial planning redefined.’
Some time ago, Ned called to say they would fetch us by helicopter from the centre of the stadium sometime after the press conference. In the meantime, if need be, we’d stay in touch by phone. We should keep an eye on the news on the dashboard TV. But he warned us to be careful: if a link is made between Bethany and what is about to happen, things will get ugly.
As if they aren’t now.
After I woke from my coma after the crash, the ‘one day at a time’ principle of coping ruled. Though often it was one minute, or even, in times of extreme pain, ten seconds. Drugs helped. The rest was down to self-delusion, a skill I’d previously scorned. Now, with the long-term definitively lost from the radar, and the future stretching no further than the conceivable handful of hours we have left, that principle reigns again. In World War Two, during the Blitz, down in the bomb shelters, men and women shagged like rabbits. In this moment I have an exquisite understanding as to why.
We’ve entered a wilderness of low-cost housing, burger bars and wrecking yards piled with picked-over vehicle carcasses and defunct scaffolding. When I roll the window down again, it isn’t for long. Bethany squawks ‘what the fuck?’ and Frazer Melville coughs in protest. The reek has taken on a putrid, ferrous edge. I close the window swiftly and gulp, fighting back a volcanic sensation of nausea. This is new psychic territory. We should get visitors’ badges. As the kilometres pass, the odour intensifies. At eleven o’clock we switch on the news on the tiny dashboard TV, and discover the reason. Tens of thousands of jellyfish have been washing up and disintegrating on the beaches of Britain, Scandinavia and northern Europe. Pictures from space show vast shoals moving towards the coasts like subsea clouds, while terrestrial images reveal whole armadas bobbing darkly against the shoreline and gathering in concentric ridges, as though a manic giant has garlanded the coastline with bubble wrap. Frazer Melville’s hands tighten on the wheel. ‘They’ve sensed it,’ he says. Moments later, when we skirt the shore again, we see it for ourselves. Illuminated by a fierce shard of sunshine, the beach glitters. For a moment we say nothing, absorbing the freakish dazzle of jelly and mucus. Then Frazer Melville points up at the sky, where a flock of black birds is circling. Soon the air is dark with them.
‘They’re leaving,’ he says.
‘Where to?’ I ask. ‘Where can they possibly go?’
‘Same place we’re going,’ murmurs a cracked voice from the back seat. She laughs dirtily. I glance back at her. The black kohl around her eyes is beginning to smudge. A glue-on metal stud on her upper lip hangs loose, and the sooty lipstick has faded to the unearthly grey favoured by zombies in splatter movies.
The TV news continues with a report about unusual dolphin and bird activity across the entire east coast of Britain, and into the Channel. A map zooms out from the UK to cover the whole North Sea region: a series of animated graphs shows how the disrupted shoaling and flocking is spreading outward from the Norwegian coast. There, marine biologists have speculated on a link with Buried Hope Alpha. Bethany, unimpressed, yawns wide and closes her mouth with a clack. ‘
