supermarkets. There was something reassuring about the emptiness. He felt more at ease here, almost alone in this forgotten town.
As they stood together by the rail, sipping their drinks and gazing at the silent bay, Forrester held his wife around her full waist. For weeks now he had barely been able to take his hands off her. Once Gould had gone it would be pleasant here. They would lie around for the rest of the summer, making love all the time and playing with the baby — a rare arrival now, the average for normal births was less than one in a thousand. Already he could visualize a few elderly peasants coming down from the hills and holding some sort of primitive earth festival on the beach.
Behind them the aircraft had reappeared over the town. For a moment he caught sight of the doctor’s silver helmet — one of Gould’s irritating affectations was to paint stripes on his helmet and flying-jacket, and on the fenders of his old Mercedes, a sophomore conceit rather out of character. Forrester had come across traces of the paint at various points around the town on the footbridge over the canal dividing the marina and airstrip at Ampuriabrava from the beach hotels in Rosas, at the corners of the streets leading to Gould’s hotel. These marks, apparently made at random, were elements of a cryptic private language. For some time now Forrester had been certain that Gould was up to some nefarious game in the mountains. He was probably pillaging the abandoned monasteries, looting their icons and gold plate. Forrester had a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.
Forrester’s last meeting with Gould, in the Dali museum at Figueras, seemed to confirm these suspicions. He had dropped Judith off at the ante-natal clinic, where the amniotic scanning would, they hoped, confirm the absence of any abnormalities in the foetus, and by an error of judgement strolled into this museum dedicated by the town to its most illustrious native artist. As he walked quickly through the empty galleries he noticed Gould lounging back on the central divan, surveying with amiable composure the surrealist’s flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities. With his silverflecked jacket and long hair in a knot, Gould looked less like a doctor than a middle-aged Hell’s Angel. Beside him on the divan were three canvases he had selected from the walls, and which he later took back to decorate his hotel rooms.
‘They’re a little too close to the knuckle for me,’ Forrester commented. ‘A collection of newsreels from Hell.’
‘A sharp guess at the future, all right,’ Gould agreed. ‘The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head.’
As they left the museum Forrester said, ‘Judith’s baby is due in about three weeks. We wondered if you’d care to attend her?’
Gould made no reply. Shifting the canvases from one arm to the other, he scowled at the trees in the deserted rambla. His eyes seemed to be waiting for something. Not for the first time, Forrester realized how tired the man was, the nervousness underlying his bony features.
‘What about the practicante? He’s probably better qualified than I am.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the birth, so much, as the…’
‘As the death?’
‘Well…’ Unsettled by Gould’s combative tone, Forrester searched through his stock of euphemisms. ‘We’re full of hope, of course, but we’ve had to learn to be realistic.’
‘That’s admirable of you both.’
‘Given one possible outcome, I think Judith would prefer someone like you to deal with it…’
Gould was nodding sagely at this. He looked sharply at Forrester. ‘Why not keep the child? Whatever the outcome.’
Forrester had been genuinely shocked by this. Surprised by the doctor’s aggression, he watched him swing away with an unpleasant gesture, the lurid paintings under his arm, and stride back to his Mercedes.
Judith was asleep in the bedroom. From her loose palm Forrester removed the Valiums she had been too tired to take. He replaced them in the capsule, and then sat unsteadily on the bed. For the last hour he had been drinking alone in the sun on the balcony, partly out of boredom the time-scale of the human pregnancy was a major evolutionary blunder, he decided — and partly out of confused fear and hope.
Where the hell was the practicante? Forrester walked on to the balcony again and scanned the road to Figueras, past the abandoned nightclubs and motorboat rental offices. The aircraft had gone, disappearing into the mountains. As he searched the airstrip Forrester noticed the dark-robed figure of a young woman in the doorway of Gould’s hangar. He had seen her mooning around there several times before, and openly admitted to himself that he felt a slight pang of envy at the assumed sexual liaison between her and Gould. There was something secretive about the relationship that intrigued him. Careful not to move, he waited for the young woman to step into the sun. Already, thanks to the alcohol and an over-scrupulous monogamy, he could feel his loins thickening. For all his need to be alone, the thought that there was another young woman within half a mile of him almost derailed Forrester’s mind.
Five minutes later he saw the girl again, standing on the observation roof of the Club Nautico, gazing inland as if waiting for Gould’s silver aircraft to return.
As Forrester let himself out of the suite his wife was still asleep. Only two of the suites on the tenth floor were now maintained. The other rooms had been locked and shuttered, time capsules that contained their melancholy cargo, the aerosols, douche-bags, hairpins and sun-oil tubes left behind by the thousands of vanished tourists.
The waiters’ service elevator, powered by a small gasolene engine in the basement, carried him down to the lobby. There was no electric current now to run the air-conditioning system, but the hotel was cool. In the two basketwork chairs by the steps, below the postcard rack with its peeling holiday views of Rosas in its tourist heyday, sat the elderly manager and his wife. Senor Cervera had been a linotype operator for a Barcelona newspaper during the years when the population slide had first revealed itself, and even now was a mine of information about the worldwide decline.
‘Mrs Forrester is asleep — if the practicante comes send him up to her.’
‘I hope it’s good news. You’ve waited a long time.’
‘If it is we’ll certainly celebrate tonight. Judith wants to open up all the nightclubs.’
Forrester walked into the sunlight, climbing over the first of the dunes that filled the street. He stood on the roof of a submerged car and looked at the line of empty hotels. He had come here once as a child, when the resort was still half-filled with tourists. Already, though, many of the hotels were closing, but his parents had told him that thirty years earlier the town had been so crowded that they could barely see the sand on the beach. Forrester could remember the Club Nautico, presiding like an aircraft-carrier over the bars and nightclubs of Ampuriabrava, packed with people enjoying themselves with a frantic fin de sicle gaiety. Already the first of the so-called ‘Venus hotels’ were being built, and coachloads of deranged young couples were coming in from the airport at Gerona.
Forrester jumped from the roof of the car and set off along the beach road towards Ampuriabrava. The immaculate sand ran down to the water, free at last of cigarette-ends and bottle-tops, as clean and soft as milled bone. As he moved past the empty hotels it struck Forrester as strange that he felt no sense of panic at the thought of these vanished people. Like Judith and everyone else he knew, like the old linotype operator and his wife sitting alone in the lobby of their hotel, he calmly accepted the terrifying logic of this reductive nightmare as if it were a wholly natural and peaceful event.
Forty years earlier, by contrast, there had been an uncontrolled epidemic of fear as everyone became aware of the marked fall in the world’s population, the huge apparent drop in the birth-rate and, even more disquieting, the immense increase in the number of deformed foetuses. Whatever had set off this process, which now left Forrester standing alone on this once-crowded Costa Brava beach, the results were dramatic and irreversible. At its present rate of decline Europe’s population of 200,000 people, and the United States’ population of 150,000, were headed for oblivion within a generation.
At the same time, by an unhappy paradox, there had been no fall in fertility, either in man or in the few animal species also affected. In fact, birth-rates had soared, but almost all the offspring were seriously deformed. Forrester remembered the first of Judith’s children, with their defective eyes, in which the optic nerves were exposed, and even more disturbing, their deformed sexual organs — these grim parodies of human genitalia tapped all kinds of nervousness and loathing.
