She nods and mumbles something indistinct. I throw her out of the door and she collapses in a heap on the drive. I take a single step forward and she backs away from me, then gets up and runs, slowing down after just a few steps because her body’s too weak to keep moving with any speed. I keep watching her until I’m sure she’s gone.
I bolt and bar the damaged door, using a padlock and chain to replace the broken lock for now. Once the house is secure I take my bunch of keys from my pocket and unlock the cupboard the woman was trying to break into. She’d have been disappointed if she’d managed to get the door open. All I keep in here is my gas burner, no food. It’s tedious having to be so careful with everything, but it’s important. The value of pretty much everything has changed immeasurably in the last year. I could leave a fucking Rolex watch in the middle of the street and it would probably still be there days later. Drop a scrap of food, though, and there’ll be a crowd fighting for it before the fastest of the few remaining seagulls have had a chance to swoop.
I double-check that the vagrant woman really has gone before unlocking another cupboard and getting out my kettle, a mug, and a spoon. Then I peel back the linoleum in the corner of the kitchen and lift up one of the loose floorboards underneath. Using a torch, I look around for a jar of coffee powder. I know I’ve got at least two down here somewhere … Christ, there’s enough food stored under my kitchen floorboards to feed half of Lowestoft. I’ve been stashing small amounts away for as long as I’ve been working for Hinchcliffe. I hold on to every scrap I’m given and I’m not eating much, so my stocks are building up. I could open a store and make a fortune selling everything I’ve got hoarded away in here, except there’s no one left who could afford my prices, and food’s probably the only viable currency left now, so there’d be no point. Even if I don’t eat it or sell it, I figure I’ll be able to bargain with some of it if I need to. There’s a cruel irony about many aspects of life these days. All that woman wanted was a little bit of food. I’ve got all this and I don’t want any of it. There’s nothing I can do about the situation, though, and, ultimately, it’s not my problem. If I’d fed her, then she’d only be back again tomorrow, begging for more and bringing others like her to my door. Things don’t work like they used to anymore. You have to be ruthless if you want to survive. There’s no room for compassion here.
I fetch water from the bathtub upstairs (I collect it in buckets, pots, and jars out back), then block the window to hide the light from the flame and start it boiling on the little stove. The constant hiss of the burning gas is welcome, taking the faintest edge off the otherwise all-consuming silence. I try to warm my hands around the light blue flame, but it doesn’t have any effect tonight.
The kettle boils, and I make my coffee. I’m about to start locking everything away again when I have to stop, my stomach suddenly cramping and my mouth watering. I unlock the door again, struggling to free the chains and get it open in time, then run outside, lean over next-door’s low fence, and finally say good-bye to a gut-full of the semicooked dog from earlier. Vomit splatters noisily over the drive of the house next to mine and steam rises from the puddle. For a couple of minutes I just stand still and breathe the ice-cold air in deeply. Soaked with sweat and feeling worryingly unsteady on my feet, I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and stagger back indoors.
My coffee’s gone cold by the time I’ve pulled myself together again and locked everything away, but it’s still strong and bitter enough to disguise the bilious aftertaste of puke. I take my drink through to the living room, put it on the little table I use, and then, still standing up, I zip myself into my sleeping bag. I jump and shuffle around to get to my chair, then collapse into it, pathetically out of breath.
I keep a pile of books by the side of the chair, taller than the table my coffee’s resting on. Books are one of the few things that can still be found relatively easily, although they’re used to fuel fires more than to fuel minds these days. I have a light on an elastic headband like a miner’s lamp (I found it on a body in an Unchanged shelter a while back). I switch it on and pick up the book on top of the pile. I study the cover, and I can’t help laughing to myself when I think how my tastes have changed. I’d never have read anything like this in the days before the war—not that I ever used to read much anyway, but this … this is the kind of book bored pensioners used to read, the kind of book that used to sell by the bucketload and appealed to lonely, dowdy, middle-aged spinsters, dreaming of the moment they knew would probably never come, when their knight in shining armor would arrive to whisk them away from their dull, mundane, and loveless lives. It’s a trashy thriller-cum-romance novel, probably written by a machine that just slotted character names and other variables into a predefined template, but I don’t care. As cliched and far-fetched as it seems, these books have become something of a release. Reading them is all I want to do when I’m alone like this. It’s how I escape from the pressures of this increasingly fucked-up world. These books help me to forget where I am and who I am and what I have to deal with each day. They help me forget the things I’ve done. They almost make me feel human again. I revel in the insignificant details. The far-fetched action set pieces leave me cold. It’s little things that get to me: descriptions of people eating, talking, traveling … living together. Those fleeting moments of normality we never used to think about. Those banal moments of calm during which we caught our breath as our lives lurched from one trivial problem to the next pointless crisis.
I start reading from where I got to last night, pausing only to look again at the beautiful woman on the painted front cover. Something about the shape of her face reminds me of the Unchanged woman I killed in the shelter earlier today. She was my first kill in weeks. I didn’t want to do it, didn’t have the same burning desire I used to, but I knew I didn’t have any choice, either. It was for the best. She’d have suffered more if I’d let her live.
I’ve just got to the part in the book where the female lead first meets the guy who’ll no doubt go on to change her life forever on his way to saving the world. Christ, what’s wrong with me? I can already feel myself welling up. By the time they inevitably end up in bed together, I’ll be crying like a fucking baby.
4
SOME FUCKER’S BANGING ON the door. I keep my eyes screwed shut, nowhere near ready to start another day just yet. If I stay still long enough and don’t react, maybe whoever it is will give up and go away. I half open one eye and look around. It’s light outside, not long after dawn. My book’s on the floor. My tired body aches more than it did when I went to sleep.
The hammering on the door continues. I know who it is now. He lifts the flap of the mail slot and shouts at me, but I don’t react. I know he’s not going anywhere, but I can’t be bothered to move. I make him wait a little longer.
“Come on, Danny, I know you’re in there.”
“Piss off, Rufus.”
He starts knocking on the window, rapping on the glass with his knuckles, and the sound hurts my head. I’ll go and see what he wants, then get rid of him. Rufus has an annoying habit of coming here when he’s got nowhere else to go, wanting to talk for hours about nothing in particular. Sometimes I can tolerate him, but I don’t feel so good this morning and I’m not in the mood. Sometimes he stays all day and we play cards together and put the world to rights (although that particular problem’s bigger than both of us), but not today. Most of the time I’ve forgotten everything he’s said by the time I’ve managed to push him back out the door.
He’s not going anywhere. Admitting defeat, I start to get up but then fall back down again when the morning cough hits me. I’ve probably smoked less than a handful of cigarettes in my whole life, but these days I sound like a chain-smoker who’s had a fifty a day habit for the last twenty years. The cough comes in wrenching waves, and I know there’s nothing I can do to fight it. I manage to stand up and steady myself on the back of the chair as another hacking burst overtakes me. My sleeping bag drops down around my feet like a used condom, leaving me freezing cold and exposed. One more painful, tearing retch, strong enough to make me feel like I’m being turned inside out, and the coughing finally starts to subside. I spit out a lump of sticky red-green phlegm into my empty coffee cup, step out of the sleeping bag, and stagger over to open the door.
“What?”
“You took your time,” he says, not impressed.
“What do you want?”
Rufus glares up at me (he’s a good few inches shorter than I am), then ducks under my outstretched arm and pushes his way into the house.
“You’re a pain in the backside, Danny. Why didn’t you just let me in?”
“I’m a pain in the backside? You’re the one banging on the window like a goddamn idiot.”
“Didn’t you hear me knocking? Fucking hell, I’ve been out there for ages. It’s freezing outside.”
