5. AFTER
Vibrations jerk Anika awake, and for the nth time she feels that fleeting half second of panic and disorientation, and then curses herself for nodding off again. Her hair sticks to her face where it’s been sandwiched between her skull and the van’s window, but she doesn’t move straightaway, the cold of the glass pressing against her forehead strangely calming.
She brushes aside enough of her fringe so that she can peer out the windscreen, just in time to watch the ancient shard of the Purdown communications tower slip past on the right-hand side of the motorway; its strange, distinctive stack of concrete disks still looking like abandoned Cold War space hardware, still transmitting nostalgic futures from its mess of long-dead aerials and dishes.
Fuck, she realizes, we’re here.
And she’s right, within seconds they’re hurtling down a concrete corridor, the motorway snaking down into northeast Bristol, and she feels her stomach flip, unsure if it’s the altitude drop or her nerves—another flash of panic, but minus the disorientation. She knows exactly where she is.
As if on cue the walls drop away and they’re on the flyover above Eastville, and through the grease mark her hair has left on the window she can, for fleeting, fragmented seconds, see into the rooms of the houses, can glance across the dome of the mosque. It always fascinates and horrifies her how close the top stories of the buildings here are to the elevated motorway, how if she could freeze time she could reach out and touch them, leap across onto someone’s roof, through someone’s open bedroom window, find somewhere to curl up and sleep. She always thought this, every time she drove back into Bristol this way, tired and wanting to get home, fascinated by the seemingly arm-length proximity to the road, horrified by whatever interpretation of progress was used to justify slicing through a community so brutally.
And then the buildings drop away, and for a second she’s disoriented again, until she twigs that she’s looking down on Eastville Park—or at least what used to be called that—the first thing she’s seen so far that seems to have changed in the last ten years, its green expanse of trees gone, flattened, turned into rows of crops, patchworked into segments too large to be community allotments or private vegetable gardens, and she sighs to herself, numbly fighting back the anger and disappointment.
“You’re awake, then, eh?” Neal flashes her a smile as he guides the van straight over the top of the Eastville roundabout, no need to pause for the nonexistent traffic. The roads have been basically empty since they left the services, and cleared everywhere—just the occasional abandoned car dragged onto the hard shoulder, the odd encampment of parked-up nomads.
“Yeah, must’ve nodded off again.” She forces herself to smile back at Neal, who seems mainly harmless.
“Well, nearly there now.” Past the silhouette of his head she catches a glance of the blue-and-yellow bulk of IKEA, the superstore looking mainly intact from up here. Now the towers are rising out of the mist to their left, gray and red brutalist monoliths, drying laundry flicking pixel-speckles of color across their faces. So little has changed, she thinks, although she can’t shake the feeling that something is missing, that there’s some stark, unidentifiable emptiness.
“Long time since you been back, yeah?” Neal asks her.
“Yeah. Long time. I got out just before things got bad.”
“Well… I reckon you picked the right time to come back. City is getting back on its feet, they say. Most people got power, most the time. They mainly got the solar back working, see?” He nods at the roofs of the houses to their right. “But it was tough for a while, yeah. Really tough. Wise decision.”
“Wise decision?”
“Staying away, until now. You made a wise decision. Things weren’t good, not for a long while. Better now though, mind.”
Anika looks back out her side window, unconvinced. Perhaps she’s left it far too long. Her stomach flips again, and then—as she stares at the empty spaces between the road and the buildings—she realizes what’s missing.
“The trees. All the trees are gone.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Well, like I say, was bad, first few years. Especially first couple of winters. Terrible, it was.”
Anika doesn’t catch his drift at first. “And… the trees?”
“Well, they burnt them all, my love.” Neal takes his eyes off the road to glance over at her with palpable sadness. “For heat.”
The next thing Anika knows, they’re off the motorway and slap-bang right into the town center, and she’s pushing herself back into her seat and holding on for dear life, her left hand grasping the door handle while the fingertips of her right try to pierce the seat’s upholstery as Neal guides the van through a mass of crisscrossing cyclists, trading curse words and hand gestures with them through his open window.
No motorized traffic at all, no cars or vans apart from them, just bikes. Fucking hundreds of bikes. Fucking hundreds of people, in fact, far more than Anika imagined—somewhere in her head she expected to come back to empty streets, abandoned buildings, silent postapocalyptic wastelands. But the opposite seems true, like the city has been pumped full of people, and all of them apparently on bikes right now, in the town center, trying to get run over by Neal’s van. And then—just as Neal narrowly avoids wiping out what looks like a whole family balanced on a single bike, a mother with a baby hanging off her, an older child sitting on the handlebars and a third riding pillion—something else hits her. They’re all so young. Children, mainly. Even the eldest faces she clocks as they whiz past seem to be barely out of their teens.
“So many kids,” she says.
Neal laughs. “Yeah. Well, I guess that’s what you get after a decade of no TV or contraception.”
Anika laughs back, nods. “How’s the life expectancy?”
Neal inhales hard. “Not great, to be honest. Hospitals are a fucking nightmare, can’t get to see a doctor, zero supplies. Seriously, anything happens to you, you’re best trying to sort it out yourself, you get me? So life expectancy… well, I dunno. I dunno an official age or anything. But put it this way—I live down in Hanham and I’m one of the oldest down my ends.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-five.”
“Ouch. You look like you’re doing all right, though?”
“Yeah… I guess. I try and look after myself, y’know? It’s tough, though. I mean, you never know what’s gonna come along, do you?”
Anika doesn’t answer.
“I mean… like I say, winters were bad. Still can be. A cold comes along and everyone gets it…” He stops himself, obviously pained. “I seen whole streets die, whole families. Not just the olds but the little kiddies, too. Just from a cough, y’know? I mean, it’s a bit better now, mind, now we got some food and that. Vegetables again, like. But still. Come autumn, someone starts coughing and you see the whole street paying attention.”
He cuts himself off by violently veering to the left, like he’s missed a turn, and Anika realizes that’s exactly what’s happened as he mounts the curb and punches the van through a hole in a nearby building. It takes Anika a minute to work out what the fuck is going on, but as they’re submerged in interior darkness she realizes they’ve just entered the Cabot Circus multistory car park. There’d been no indication it was there, she realizes, no street furniture, no signage, no entrance barriers. She wonders if they’d all been burned for heat too.