Next thing she knows they’re hurtling up the huge spiral ramp, and she’s gripping the seat and handle again—partly out of fright at Neal’s slightly too fast velocity, partly because the strobing effect of the sunlight as they spin past the ramp’s columns threatens to induce seizures. She closes her eyes to block it out, but then the dislocated motion of the climbing, twisting van turns her stomach and she opens them again, realizing just how unused to traveling in cars she’s become.
Then they’re off the ramp, and Neal finally seems to cut his speed for the first time since they left Wales, easing them around pillars and parked cars—most of them looking to Anika like they’ve been here awhile, abandoned. Cars and vans much newer than the antique Ford they’re sitting in now: driverless cars, fuel-cell-powered, digitally controlled. Chinese, Korean, Brazilian designs. All useless now. Some of them have been stripped for parts, some have been burned out, others converted into what looks like living spaces; she catches the glimpse of curtain fabric in windows, notices how some of the cars have been moved to create walls, defenses. Security. It’s like a small town on this level, streets formed out of spaces between the abandoned machines, lit by repurposed headlights, paved with tarpaulin and piss and oil. She can smell it.
“Right, that’s the exit over there,” says Neal, pointing toward an impossibly dark-looking corner. “When you open the door I want you to just walk straight there, don’t stop and talk to anybody, right?”
“Right.”
“Oh, and I nearly forgot.” Neal turns to her, flashes his Jack-the-lad smile.
“What?”
“Welcome home, girl.”
“Yeah. Cheers.”
Neal makes her memorize the day and time he’ll be heading to Wales again, just in case she wants a ride, and then she leaves him to fend off the scavengers and traders clamoring to see what’s in the back of his van. She makes it to the exit unhassled, drops down a couple of flights of scruffy steps until she hits level three, makes her way past blackening walls and the broken shells of parking ticket and vending machines until she finds the curved glass bridge that leads over to Cabot Circus proper. She’s not actually been this way that many times, no need—never owned a car, and lived just down the road anyway—plus she always hated Cabot, a pointless, overcomplicated senses assault you avoided until you had no choice.
Despite her unfamiliarity, she doesn’t pause too long on the bridge, mindful of Neal’s advice—she stops just long enough to glance at the street below, surprised at how little has changed. The buildings, huge cubes of flat concrete, still stand, even some of their windows still intact, more drying laundry fluttering from balconies. At least they’re being used, she thinks, these redundant office blocks and hotels apparently repurposed as living spaces. Necessarily, it appears. The biggest change is still the bikes, flowing through the streets like floodwater—there’s so many of them, so many people, that it starts to spin Anika out as she watches them swarm below her, their unflinching movement and the bridge’s transparent curvature conspiring in vertigo. She closes her eyes again briefly, steps away from the rail, reopens them, and focuses on the floor until she reaches the other side.
Cabot Circus, third floor. It’s like stepping out into the upper level of a huge, angular amphitheater—Cabot always seemed ancient to Anika, like it’s stood here for centuries, despite her knowing full well it’s barely twenty-five years old. Before it was here Bristol’s central retail district was a disorganized mess, intersected by roads and traffic, meaning any shopping trip involved multiple road crossings, snarl-ups, gridlocks, and the occasional dead child. The obvious answer would have been to pedestrianize a chunk of it, but people—especially Bristolians, it seemed to Anika—loved their cars back then, so instead they demolished a chunk of it and built an out-of-town shopping mall in a middle-of-town space.
She leans on the railing, stares down into the pit lit by pale sunlight falling through the grease-smeared glass of the huge structure’s once-futuristic matrix of a roof, shadows projecting a faint grid onto everything below. Again she’s surprised by the sheer number of people—there’s a fair few wandering around on this level and the one below, but the ground floor is heaving, thick with bodies, a never-ending, swirling whirlpool of people. She smiles to herself, seeing the truth in Neal’s joke—you can try to starve a population, deprive them of health care, power, and data, but you can’t stop them fucking.
The smile grows into a self-deprecating chuckle; and she’s strangely embarrassed that part of her had imagined walking out into some huge abandoned space: a bourgeois science-fictional fantasy of a long-lost civilization where she’s the special one, the only survivor that could see past the crass commercialism of the masses and got out in time, the intrepid, educated explorer unearthing this forgotten, archaic relic of barbaric capitalism, an empty cave filled with unfamiliar, alien branding.
Instead, most of the branding has gone, ripped down from the fronts of shops and disposed of with the same startling ease with which the digital entities that owned them blinked out of existence, their physical manifestations grinding to a halt as the data that kept them alive simply vanished. Like a splintered army lost too deep into enemy territory, their supply lines were overrun and their troops had deserted their positions, going permanently AWOL as they slipped away into the surrounding forces.
But Cabot itself still remains, and, free of the branding and mission statements and retail management strategies, it seems, to Anika’s curiosity, to be flourishing: parents wander around in their charity-shop mélange of found clothes, dragging children in oversized T-shirts printed with images that have been long separated from their fleeting cultural significance—what they used to call refugee chic—stopping at the stalls that would previously never have been allowed to litter the elevated walkways that line and cross the complex’s central atrium. She finds herself heading down the steps of a long-motionless escalator to the floor below, eager to explore, drawn to join in, wanting to experience what appears to be the decentralized, community-driven anarchic economy they’d spent so many late, stoned, enthusiasm-soaked nights dreaming of in fevered, utopian discussions.
Instead, standing in the silence of the first shop she passes, she finds inevitable disappointment. For a start, the nameless store has barely any stock, and what is here is a disorganized mess of broken, discarded junk piled up in boxes or spread randomly around the half-bare shelving—at first glance she thinks it could even be the ramshackle debris left over from the original store’s ransacking, but soon she realizes the truth is even more depressing. For that to be true there’d have to be some shred of purpose, form. Between embarrassed glances she starts to think that maybe it’s just her own deep-rooted, bred-in consumer expectations clouding her assessment, so she tries to throw them aside and embrace the nonconforming landfill-mined chaos of scuffed plasticwear, broken crockery, torn clothing, dead electronics, and crumbling paperbacks—but it’s impossible. There’s not just a lack of organization here, it’s a total absence of function, value. She gingerly lifts an empty beer bottle from a detritus-strewn shelf, and where her fingers disturb its dusty surface they reveal glimmering deep brown, something she realizes she’s not seen for years. Sculpted, manufactured glass; industrial machine art designed to capture light and catch the eye. She can’t hold back the sense-memory-fueled smile, as she twists it in her hands, trying to ascertain the brand—but the label is gone, leaving behind no identifying traces on its surface, so blank that even the machine that made it would struggle to classify it, the only thing resembling a bar code being the streaks of white paper and residual glue left behind as the label was torn away.