Before the Ruins Read online

  Everyone else started to go home. Nothing had been achieved. I had a trapped and hopeless feeling. The last thing I watched, before finally leaving around seven, were a few unboxing videos. I had stumbled on this particular series a while ago. They were oddly calming. In each one, a pair of smooth white hands, employing a small pair of scissors and occasionally a craft knife, opened a package containing a desirable consumer item, usually something electronic. The unboxing was always done against the background of a blue cloth and the maker of the video had added an unobtrusive soundtrack, over which the occasional small sigh could be heard when the pair of hands encountered an obstacle—a particularly resistant flap or bit of tape. The process was neither rushed nor unduly lingered over. In each video, the sequence happened in the same order: First the exterior packaging was opened and discarded, then any accompanying information, instructions, and so forth were extracted and held up to the camera, then came the turn of the accessories—chargers, batteries, and so forth—if they existed. Finally, the interior packaging was inspected and the product itself withdrawn, cleared of any protective sleeves and displayed by the hands from each angle. And every time, when the moment finally came, I wondered if the hundreds of thousands of other people who watched these videos felt the same as I did, the same anticipation, the same surprise, and ultimately the same disappointment—that what was inside the box was just a thing.

  CHAPTER 6

  APOCALYPSE III

  I could say it gave me a moment’s pause, going back out to the manor on my own to meet David, but that would be a lie. I was sour at the others for leaving me to spend the apocalypse with my mother, as though they had conspired to make my worst nightmare come true—me and my mother, the last people on earth, locked in battle.

  She called out my name a couple of times. Her voice was plaintive. I was in the bathroom, door bolted, and didn’t answer. Soon she went away. I didn’t want to fight with her, but I just couldn’t find it inside myself, a kind word, a peace offering of any sort, even as I forced myself to think that it was the last chance I would ever have. Later, when I found out she’d eaten all the bread from the bread bin, a whole loaf that I had bought and paid for because she spent most of her giro on cans, I would be glad.

  I ran a bath and slipped into the water. It was lukewarm and three inches deep. I got a washcloth and ran it over myself, climbed out and fought my hair back into a plait while looking in the bit of mirror we kept propped against the window, and in which I saw only pieces of myself, rubber lips, small chin, round grayish eyes. In the pane I could see a second reflection, whole, colorless, a mere outline superimposed over the field. In the twilight the barley was fawn and swaying where the breeze touched it. I waited there, watching, and it seemed that they were playing, the barley bowing to the breeze, the breeze gusting then abating. When it was gone, the barley seemed to wait, to tremble for it. It was like watching lovers.

  * * *

  When I left, the TV was off, but she had the radio on. Nights, if she was home, she liked to listen to the local show where people called up to talk about what was on their minds, in the middle of the night phoning in to get things off their chests about crop circles and ley lines, car clamping and the Criminal Justice Bill. My mother listened from the sofa, or paced the room. I sometimes imagined she was waiting to hear someone in particular, or for one of the speakers to say something, magic words perhaps, that would release her from her spell. Now I wonder if it wasn’t simply that she had gone beyond music, that listening to it confused and disquieted her, like someone hearing a language they had once understood well, but which was now lost to them.

  I took the Ridgeway back to the manor, jogged the three miles there swinging my arms. The track led across the Downs, a pale chalk road. I heard rabbits bolting in the darkness, pebbles skittering under my feet. I put home out of my mind and it was easy, like switching off a light. Midway, the track went through a copse where it was lightless, where the night was thicker, and my body shied like a blinkered horse as though sensing something my eyes couldn’t see.

  At the manor, I found David in a room on the first floor. I called for him and he answered, so I followed his voice through the dark rooms and up the creaking stairs and then down a black corridor toward a little flickering light. He was at the window, lighting a cigarette from a candle.

  “Every time you do that, a sailor dies. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now.” David turned to me. “Will it be very violent, the end of the world? The dead bursting out of their graves and so on.”

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “Then I am glad you’re here.” The room was blue and the candle burned with an almost white flame. It did not seem end-of-the-worldish, but there was something old about it, as though the moment was not as freshly minted as others I had known. “Do we know when it is going to end exactly?”

  “No.”

  “So it could be any moment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then,” he said.

  “Well then what?”

  “Well then, I should probably tell you something.”

  * * *

  David was a liar, a thief, and in considerable trouble. It made me like him, when before I had not been sure. I liked stealing too. I liked things that were stolen. That morning, the last of my money had got me a half bottle of rum and two liters of supermarket brand Coke. I also had a crumb of hash, which we smoked out in the rose garden sitting on the stone bench where Mortimer had died, not that we knew it at the time. The beds were a tangle of weeds and thorns, but peeping out from among them were roses, still unfurling from their buds. While we talked, I tore off their heads and shredded the petals between my fingers.

  There had been some kind of school trip to Italy. He had borrowed a coat and gone out and met some people and decided not to go back. Or not decided, one thing just leading to another. Only the coat had had credit cards and quite a large amount of money in it. And he had spent the money, and used the card a couple of times, three times at most, while thinking about what to do. Then, when he had decided he ought to go back, say sorry, and promise to pay back the money, etc., it was too late and the police were looking for him.

  “Whose was the coat?”

  “A teacher’s.”

  It wasn’t the whole of it, but I didn’t press. I wasn’t seeking a hold over him, at least not then.

  We took the rum and Coke and went down to the lake, following the path round to the temple, where we inspected the plinth, which bore a stone head of Athena. Then, sitting cross-legged on the leaf-littered floor, we watched the moon slipping down into the water like a bather.

  “Isn’t it supposed to become as blood?”

  David told me that in Rome, site of his recent troubles, there were great oil paintings of the apocalypse, and catacombs under the city, and that aboveground the city was full of statues of great men whose faces had been destroyed, the noses chiseled off by waves of invaders, and that right in the center were the ruins of the giant Colosseum, where you could sit on stone seats, look down, and see the underground passageways where the animals were led or kept chained before being released to gobble up Christians.

  “They used to damn people to beasts.” His voice was dreamy. “I had a dream once they set a fanged giraffe onto me. If you killed a parent, they put you in a leather bag full of vipers and then drowned you all together in a bucket.”

  He told me he’d been at the manor four days, that he’d walked a mile to the nearest pub to call me, and was about to give up when I answered.

  Something slapped upon the surface of the water and the bathing moon broke into ripples.

  “It’s the kraken,” he said. “It wakes up at the end of the world, says so in Revelation.”

  “Peter’s father is a vicar,” I said. “But he never reads from the good bits. I think he’s embarrassed by them. It’s all love and peace and Christian fellowship with him.”

  “Clever Peter,” he said, “who’s missing the e
nd of the world in the service of algebra.”

  He touched my arm. The skin of his palm was dry. I followed him back down the path to a spot on the lawn by the water’s edge where we pondered the reeds in silence. I was waiting for him to try something. After all, he’d called me, not one of the others. I’d come because I wanted to know what I’d do. If I would turn my back on him, or laugh, let him kiss me, or say something mean. But David didn’t do anything, even though I was standing a small step closer than was necessary, even though afterward he could say he was drunk, even though it was the end of the world.

  Instead, he stood there, eyes to the sky, waiting. The moon was her fat self, pouring out a cold, pale light that put the stars to shame. I stole a couple of quick glances at his face and then back to the night. We waited and I could tell David was listening, so I listened too. The road had fallen silent, and in the quiet it was possible to feel, if not to hear, the music of the place, the manor itself, and of the great chalk ridges of the Downs, and the moon’s chilling melody.

  And David standing there, tensed, as though the heavens were just about to be rent asunder. For a funny moment, the game became real. That’s the only way I can describe it. A shudder passed through me and then, as though it had leapt from my body to his, David shuddered too. It went on a little longer, the moment, until its edges trembled and it collapsed inward, and in the aftermath, as though from very far away, I heard the laughter spilling from us both, spilling like water.

  * * *

  We stayed up the whole night, waiting for it to happen, but it still didn’t come. The sky was reddening in the east, as though a great fire were burning, but soon it faded and the light was pale and colorless.

  We lay on the bed, on a sagging mattress. Heads in opposite corners, feet in the middle, not touching. We were weeks away from touching, and even then David would never touch me first. He brought you close with talk but did nothing. It made a space. With Marcus, he was always there before me. He wanted me and was prepared to stay close, to queue patiently for whatever I would dish out, till I felt like a hair-netted, apron-wearing server in a canteen. But with David there was space, and in it I would learn what it was to burn for someone. Only a forewarning, then, on the musty sheet, a far-off siren, no cause yet for alarm.

  Below a wood pigeon, breast thrust out like Napoleon, strode across the lawn. I thought of the day to come, of all the days to come, of my mother in her room at home; once she had had fresh starts, heralding spring cleans, swearings off, jacket potatoes and tuna, but there were no fresh starts now; the days were a pack of cards wiped clean of their faces. A pack of days to come, and among them the possibility of a black jack. The sound of the old Merc’s engine behind me in the lane. Joe at the wheel. Peter always said he was gone forever, but what did Peter know?

  David went with me as far as the gate. On either side of the drive, the grass was sopping with dew. At the bend near the front of the house, there were bicycle tire tracks in it, just for a couple of meters, as though the rider had wobbled off course.

  “Did you call anyone else? Before me, I mean.”

  “No. Just you.”

  “If I hadn’t answered, who would you have called next?”

  “I don’t know. Will you come back?”

  “So you’re staying?”

  “I need to think what to do. And I like it here. Don’t you, Andy? There’s something about it.” David smiled. The top incisor on the left next to his canine was chipped sharp. In combination with the smile, it made him look a bit fox-like.

  “I suppose.” As though I could have stopped myself coming back, even if I tried. There had been that moment, you see, that moment with David at the lakeside when I had felt something, something rare. As a child I would have called it magic. As an adult, you weren’t supposed to believe in magic, even if you needed it, even if you needed it desperately.

  * * *

  Mrs. East’s front door cracked open and she beckoned me over.

  “Saw you coming back down the lane. I’d give anything to sleep like I did when I was your age, and there’s you wasting it. Tea?”

  Inside, her house was the same as ours, save it looked like the person who lived there liked it. There were family pictures on the walls. A grainy black-and-white of her parents. Her son, Ian, a boy in a donkey jacket with a puppy, a man with a bow tie and a lost expression. My favorite was the one of her husband in uniform during the war. He was wearing an army cap and smiling. It was a picture taken to give to a woman. The eyes were promising.

  Mrs. East told me once that while he’d been away fighting the Germans, she used to go dancing with airmen from the RAF camp. She told me she couldn’t sit at home for five years and that there had been an American who told her he painted her name on the side of the big bombs before they flew them over Germany. “He told me I set Hamburg alight,” she said and I knew he was her lover, the American, and I wondered if her husband had known it too.

  After Mrs. East had poured the tea, she got the frying pan out and put four rashers in it. When it started to sizzle, she went and stood over it, giving the bacon the odd idle push with an egg slice. Only after I started talking, telling her about David and the manor, did she take a couple of the rashers out of the pan, sandwich them between two slices of bread, and hand me a plate along with the sauce bottle.

  As I ate, she came over and I felt her pick up the end of my plait and hold it between her fingers for a second. “Don’t get old, Andy.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “This lad, blond haired or dark?”

  “Blondish.”

  “Blond men go bald early. Such a shame.” Her smile was quick and wicked. “What’s he like then?”

  What was David like? I furrowed my brow.

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” Mrs. East let out a dry laugh that turned into a coughing fit. Finally, between wheezes she got out, “You’ll have to dance with him. We always said you could tell what a man was like by dancing with him.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind.”

  Mrs. East slid the pack of cards out of the drawer. Usually, we played chase the ace, trumps, or gin rummy. Mrs. East liked to win too. “Before the war the manor took a lot of staff from Marlborough and villages, maids, gardeners, all that.”

  I dabbed the last crust in the puddle of bacon grease while she shuffled, the cards making ripping noises between her hands, which were all knuckle and vein and gleaming ring. I slid a B&H from the pack, lit it, and passed it to her, and then lit one for myself.

  “Poacher.”

  I had a look at my hand. It was not bad, not bad at all. Mrs. East ran her tongue over her teeth and exhaled smoke out of her nose in two plumes, like a dragon. She fanned the cards and studied her hand, looked up.

  “Maybe you’ll find the diamonds, Andy.”

  CHAPTER 7

  TELEPHONE BOX

  Peter was fine, Peter was almost definitely fine. I swept my trolley down the frozen aisle under the neon strip lights. Peter was having a small existential collapse, an episode, hopefully somewhere warm where it wasn’t pissing down.

  After work I had gone home, and then, unable to settle, I had come here. The supermarket was open till midnight. I liked it best near closing time. Without the hordes, it was a soothing place to wander, a hypnotic dreamscape, a place I felt myself largely absent, as though crowded out by the spirits of my ancestors, the thousands of generations who had starved in winter and tottered about in rags and watched their children die of scurvy, who knew that the moment I was living was an anomaly—a brief comfort-saturated flaring in which the human race burnt through everything it had, like a wild sailor on shore leave—and who wanted to enjoy the moment, to roam the aisles of the supermarket and choose between thirty-three types of bread.

  The past, what I had escaped, what I had lost, were not what I wanted to think about. Peter could have any number of reasons for going AWOL. Instead, I lingered over toiletries and cleaning products and condiments, hand hovering a
s I selected and rejected. Teams of people had spent many hours ensuring each item was as convincing as possible. I let the waterfall of words—jalapeño, Californian, corn-fed—wash over me, maneuvering my little trolley, comforted by the anonymous presence of others. Was I close to running out of Worcestershire sauce? How were stocks of dried goods? These were questions I could answer.

  I chose the last remaining cashier over the self-service checkout. She smiled at me and I smiled quickly back. The total came to £19.02 and I gave her a £20 note and the extra two pennies and I got another smile as she handed me the shopping bag with my items and the receipt in it; between us, we managed the whole thing so deftly and humanly, I felt quite reassured. Just before the automatic doors, for a split second I was tempted to go back and ask the cashier if, broadly speaking, she thought everything was going to be okay.

  The rain danced on the road and the cars swished past, their lights shimmering in yellow and red on the wet tarmac. I hung the carrier bag from my wrist, put my umbrella up in one smooth movement, and stepped out resolutely onto the pavement. Cold droplets bounced upward, beading my tights. I hurried on. Up ahead, something fell down in front of one of the streetlamps, a fairly large item and heavy, since it fell so fast. I heard a man cry out, a rough shout of fear, and then I saw another person run across the road in front of a car.

  I could not tell what had happened, but my instinct, honed by years of living in London, was to turn on my heel and find an alternative route home. Man run amok at Waterloo? Then I’ll take the Northern Line via Bank. As I hesitated, a small crowd drew up around something. All of a sudden, the situation, like one of those pictures of a platter of fruit and vegetables that turns out to be a man’s face, resolved itself. Someone, or something, had fallen from the roof. If it was a something, it had hit a someone. Someone was on the ground.