They complicate shit.
'Just peachy,' I mumble-repeated, morose.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By then, the TV broadcasts were getting random.
The signal itself was okay. Would continue to be for another year or two, up until the power died and the generators sucked dry on fuel and all the diehards up at White City gave up. By which time barely anyone had a TV left working anyway.
But at the start, loud and clear, picture-perfect, 100% dross.
Mostly it was repeats. A computer governed the scheduling, I guessed, to cover holes and overruns. Endless episodes of Only Fools and Horses, long-gone seasons of Porridge and The Good Life, a smattering of game shows whose contestants won or lost years before. Friends reruns, over and over and over and over, and anyone who gave a shit waited in vain for an episode called 'The One Where Everyone Dies of an Unknown Flesh-Digesting Virus.'
No one was making anything new. No documentaries about the present emergency. No one had the time or energy to programme the channels.
Everyone was too busy staying alive.
This was at the beginning. This was during The Cull itself, as The Blight swept the country, as the infrastructure gave way like a dam made of salt and all the comfortable little certainties – advertising, street- sweepers, hotdog stalls, the Metro newspaper on the underground, discount sales, pirated DVDs, free samples in supermarkets, full vending machines – all the little frills you never fucking noticed, just slowly…
…went away.
Except the news. Sometimes, anyway. 'God Bless the BBC!' People would say, as they passed in the street, tripping on bloody bodies and dead riot cops. Sometimes days would piss past with nothing – no bulletins at the top of the hour, no 'we-interrupt-this-antique-comedy-to-bring-you-breaking-news' – and out in the rain all the uncertain crowds who couldn't work out why they weren't coughing and dying like everyone else were all anxiety and confusion, waiting beside the screens. But once in a while… once in a while.
I imagined a skeleton crew, struggling on bravely at Television Centre; sleeping and living in its ugly bulges just to get the word out. I imagined them feeling pretty good about themselves, like the fireman who goes above and beyond to save a crying kid, like an artist who doesn't sleep for a week to get the right tones, the right shades, the right effects. Like the soldier who keeps going, who never gives up, no matter what.
In a civilised – and I use the word with the appropriate levels of irony – world, news is just another commodity. It so rarely affects you. It so rarely intersects with the sheltered, blinkered universe of your real world. It's just another entertainment. Another distant work of fiction (or as good as) to be picked apart and discussed in the local boozer, over tea or coffee, sat on the train, wherever.
The Cull changed all that. The Cull made it so everyone was living the news, all the time. Suddenly all the people – the quiet little nobodies who called themselves 'normal' and never made a fuss – knew what it was like to be a native of Baghdad, or an earthquake widow, or a disgraced politician. Suddenly they all knew what it was like to switch on the box and hear all about themselves, their own world, their own shitty lives, discussed in the same autocue-serious tone as every other dismal slice of bad news.
It must have been a weird sensation.
(Not for me, though. I'd been making the news for years, one way or another. And I mean 'making'. Some weeks it felt like foreign affairs correspondents would've been out of a job but for me and mine, though they didn't know it. And no one ever said my name.)
On this particular day, the eagerness to receive fresh information was stronger than ever. All throughout the blistered wastes of London, little knots of people had formed – their clothes not yet raggedy, but getting there; their faces not yet malnourished and gaunt, but getting there – to crowd around flickering sets in front rooms and electronics shops, tolerating the dismal repeats on the off-chance of a new bulletin.
Two days ago, they'd mentioned the bombs falling in America. Rumours of atomic strikes, attacks all across the world, missiles going up and tumbling back down, EM pulses like technological plagues and supertech 'Star Wars' defences misfiring; farting useless interceptors into lightning storms and spitting heat seekers into the sea.
When they'd made that announcement – a couple of days before – it had been tricky to know how much was confirmed and how much was fabrication. Concocted, one suspected, by the dishevelled creature sat behind the news-desk, staring in terror at the trembling camera. It was difficult to imagine the usual BBC specimens – bolt upright, faces slack, Queen's English spoken with a crisp enunciation that bordered on the ridiculous – stammering and coughing quite so much as the nervous girl huddled behind her sheaf of papers, as she told an entranced London that nuclear Armageddon was right around the corner, then sipped carefully at her water.
It had been a tense couple of days, since.
I sat it all out in the flat. It had changed since that gloomy day when I got the text, when the removal guys failed to show up, when the ambulances streaked past one after another. Now the fish tank lay smashed on the floor, the CDs were all off the shelf in a heap, a couple of pot plants were turning slowly brown with their stalks broken and roots unearthed, and the front door sported a few splintered little holes where I'd shot it – for no reason other than to let the neighbours know I was armed.
I'd had a tantrum or two, that's all.
The phone hadn't rung. There were no more text messages. Nothing.
Oh, and, PS: nuclear bombs may be about to fall.
Not the best week of my life.
The point was, on this day, when the catchphrase comedy was blissfully interrupted and the serious little NEWSFLASH screen cut-in without announcement or music, pretty-much every poor beleaguered fucker in the entire city leaned a little closer to the set, and held their breath.
It was a new face behind the news desk – even younger than the last one, with an untidy mop of hair and a thick pair of glasses that reflected the shimmering blue of the autocue off-puttingly – and he cleared his throat agonisingly before beginning.
What he said had nothing whatsoever to do with bombs.
'Good afternoon,' he said. I almost laughed. 'A UN-sponsored team of researchers based in the United States have today released a statement regarding the unknown sickness that is now estimated to have struck two thirds of the countries of the World, and shows no sign of abating. Despite the poor quality of the signal, agencies still in contact with the BBC across the Atlantic have confirmed it to be genuine, though its source is as-yet unknown.
'According to the report, the disease targets particular biological conditions with a precision formerly unknown in medical science. Referred to by the unnamed author of the report as the 'AB-Virus,' the infection – which is airborne and requires no physical contact to transmit – attacks red blood cells at an unprecedented rate; causing muscular, respiratory and cardiac failure within days.'
A cut-rate graphic appeared on the screen: a crude image of eight identical human silhouettes, in two rows of four columns. Headers across the top of the table read A, B, AB and O, whilst the rows were marked with simple mathematical symbols for positive and negative.
'Oh shit…' I whispered. The penny was beginning to drop.
'Each person,' the voice continued, settling into a sort of cod-documentary narration, 'possesses one of four distinct types of blood – known as phenotypes. These are characterised by the various protein markers, or 'antigens', upon the surface of each red blood cell. So, people of phenotype 'A' have A-antigens,' here the first column of the table lit-up in lurid yellow, 'and people of phenotype 'B' have B-antigens. Those whose blood-type is 'AB' have antigens of both varieties, whilst those with no antigens at all belong to phenotype 'O'.'
In each case the strip of yellow highlighting clunked its way along the table. I felt like I was watching one of those godawful educational videos they used to crack-out in biology lessons at school, with the unconvincing sexual metaphors and the pulpy innards of rats and frogs.
'The practical effect of this system is to determine what blood-types are safely viable for transfusion into
