Jane lit candles and put a flame to the wood stove in Plessey’s cosy little kitchenette. There was a water butt labelled Lavage at the heavily barred fire escape at the back of the shop. He knocked his hip against it, listened. Plenty. He carried countless pans of water to the stove and to the bath. When it was full and steaming, Jane undressed, closing his eyes against the dips and hollows and shadows, and slid into the water. He shampooed his hair and clipped his fingernails. He massaged the blood back into his toes. When he got out, the bath revealed a tidemark of dark grey scum. He towelled himself dry in front of the warm stove. He cut his hair with a pair of sharpish barber’s scissors from one of Plessey’s chests of wonders and shaved, carefully, with a cut-throat razor and some rose-scented cream whisked onto his bristles with a shaving brush made from badger hair.
He ate warm chicken soup with stale water biscuits crumbled into it. He sat in Plessey’s leather armchair in a towelling bathrobe sipping cognac, his other hand on the stock of the rifle lying across his lap. He felt reborn. When he slept, he dreamed of a black lake, still and deep, surrounded by black mountains and a sky bluing at its edges, brimful of stars. He dreamed of Cherry’s body, the way it had been when they met, not towards the end when she refused to be naked in the same room as him. She had been slender, almost athletic. She liked to squeeze her breasts when he made love to her. It turned him on to see her so thrilled by her own body. He dreamed of her now, beneath him, moving to his rhythm, her fingers snagging and tickling at her nipples. She looked up into his eyes and there was nothing there. No recognition. No love. No sense of who she was herself. He was looking up at himself through her eyes. No sweat, no expression of mounting excitement. They both stopped fucking. They both deflated, like rubber dolls under a knife. There was nothing to them whatsoever.
Knocking at the door.
Jane wakened feeling drowsy and unfamiliar. He was hot. He wiped sweat from his brow. The room was baking. He got up from the armchair and slopped cognac over the bathrobe. He got his finger behind the trigger of the rifle, the butt under his armpit, and scurried to the door, the muzzle of the gun pointing at the ground by his foot. He held his breath and placed his ear to the door. He heard something shuffling outside. He heard a muttered oath and knew this was no Skinner.
‘Who is it?’ he called.
‘It’s Simmonds.’
He opened the door a crack and her lachrymose expression dipped into view.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘You’ve scrubbed up well,’ she said. ‘Hot date?’
He waited, staring at her.
‘We’re on the move,’ she said.
‘What? Where? How do you mean?’
Simmonds looked behind her. ‘You think you might let me in? I know it’s daytime and all that, but I still get the heebie-jeebies being outside.’
He let Simmonds in and put a kettle of water on the stove.
‘Nice place Plessey sorted himself out with here.’
Jane nodded. ‘Some people feel safer locked in, having just one place. Not for me, though. I don’t know how he manages.’ He stopped preparing cups of tea and glanced back at Simmonds. ‘Managed, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Most unfortunate, that.’
‘So who’s on the move?’
‘Becky came to us. She brought the radio. We heard the broadcasts.’
Jane handed her a cup. ‘And you think it’s worth exploring?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything has to be better than this. It’s like being a cured ham hanging in a room for months, waiting for someone to come and select you. I’d rather take my chances out in the wilds than have slices taken off me by some churning mouth with a sac attached to it.’
‘Well, when you put it like that,’ Jane said.
‘There are some hot zones in need of a messenger. We’ve got Harris, MacCreadle and Barrett on it at the moment. You up for a mercy mission?’
‘Where’s Becky?’ he asked.
‘We’re hiding her. Priority case. Wrapping the poor dear in cotton wool.’
‘Why?’
The sad eyes grew larger. A crack appeared in Simmonds’s niggardly mouth, the closest she would ever get to a smile. ‘You don’t know? Oh, my dear sir. There’s congratulations in order, clever boy. She’s pregnant.’
22. FEARFUL SYMMETRY
Jane saw two or three knots of people heading for the A20 out of London that day. He wished he could go with them, but he was committed to this task. He couldn’t leave knowing that Harris, MacCreadle and Barrett, all older than him, all family men, were dashing around the London survivor hot spots, disseminating information, getting people up onto their feet for the long march south. He checked each face that floated owlishly by, though. He could not and would not stop searching. It was difficult, trying to imagine how Stanley might have changed over the past ten years. There had been a marked alteration in Aidan’s features; he had been hardened by experience. He guessed Stanley would have been too. But nobody he saw fit the identikit portrait in his mind.
The numbers of people thinned out soon. It was disheartening to think that so few had made it. In terms of percentages dead, he couldn’t know for sure, but after the ninety-nine and the decimal point, he was willing to bet there were lots more nines involved. By the time he reached the City Road he was on his own again, his shoes slapping echoes from a thin gruel of slush and ash. A pipe had burst underground; water was geysering from a crack at the southern end of Upper Street. He splashed through a small river at the mouth of the Tube station, struggling to pull back the barrier gates, their runners snagged in years of accumulated litter. He stood in the entrance hall, water sluicing past him, roaring down the escalators. It would be dark, properly dark, before he’d made it halfway down there. He thought there might have been a mistake. Of all the places people could choose to live, why here, in permanent night? He wondered if his exhortations to leave might not be understood. Too long out of the real world and everything shut down.
Chalk marks adorned the walls, all of them orange. Someone had scrawled Come and play. Jane went to the mouth of the escalators and peered down. He supposed the tunnel network offered a freedom that wasn’t necessarily available on the surface. But he still would not swap the skin of the earth with the veins beneath it. Like veins, the tunnels would become more and more furred. There was structural collapse occurring all over the city. He didn’t fancy being marooned between stations with flood water hammering towards him from both ends. Or a ceiling giving way. Or a fire breaking out. There was nobody to maintain the upkeep of the system any more. People choosing to come down here, he thought, descending the longest escalators in the entire network, were out of their minds.
At the base of the escalator he was groping blindly. His foot reached level ground and he stood still for a while, head cocked, listening for signs of life. Shapes began to become known to him: the edge of a wall, the outline of a maintenance doorway, the familiar London Underground roundel against white tiles. His scalp crept as he considered the possibility of Skinners, lots of them, standing mere feet away. But popular wisdom spoke of Skinners rarely sinking below street level. They didn’t like the stink, some said. Or maybe there was some kind of interference with their internal compasses, an anomaly in the magnetic flow. Maybe they were confused by the various scents barrelling around the tunnels, pushed and pulled from unknowable sources any number of miles away. Maybe they were just smart, biding their time, knowing that the inevitable collapse of the honeycomb would send people running into their arms.