One, now.
Beauty was erased from this world. Perhaps for ever. He stopped at the middle of the bridge, looking down at the fragmented skulls and the shrivelled skins, wondering if this spot was where the two of them used to stand all those years ago. There was no warm ghost of recognition. No magical exclamation mark making itself known in the air. His heart beat normally. Some of the skyscrapers along the waterfront were slowly sliding into the river. The tugs and barges were burnt-out shells floating on a scum of clothes and driftwood. Fires burned in more and more regions of the city; a pall of black smoke formed an underscore to the metallic ceiling of cloud. When the wind changed direction he might hear a scream or the concussion of an explosion as a gas pipe ruptured. He shot one last look back over his shoulder at Aldwych, certain he would see the figure in the striped pyjamas, but there were just the same old grim tumbleweeds of skin and soot, dust devils of peeled white faces, rising into the sky.
Hope had wormed so many openings in him that he felt honeycombed. At any moment he might collapse in on himself. More dust to add to the drifts already shifting along the roads and pavements. Dunes of regret. A shattering desert.
He felt old beyond his years. His thigh pulsed hotly as he walked. There was a hand of pain at the very centre of the wound and it had long fingers. His flesh was sensitive as far south as his knee and north just to the edge of his ribs. Not a good sign. He chewed painkillers and eyed the remaining ampoules as if they were golden chalices. They were, he supposed. He had to use them sparingly. Becky had slipped them into his palm with a kiss.
Medic’s perks. Just to prove that I like you, that I think you’re a bit of all right.
He pulled his hood up over his head and zipped the coat closed. His pockets clinked with four stoppered bottles of paraffin. His tongue took a tour of his mouth, squirming in the soft dips of his undressing gums. His remaining teeth seemed too long, too loose, his jaws receding from them as if they were foreign bodies to be ejected. But at least there was no blood in his fist when he coughed. No hair loss. He regularly checked his testicles for lumps, but nothing doing there either. No hard masses beneath the skin of his stomach. No fits, no blackouts. He was as healthy as he could expect to be. So just periodontal disease, then? Just the unlucky caries that come from too many sweets and not enough flossing.
At the South Bank he got down off the bridge and followed the obstacle course of the Queen’s Walk as far as Bermondsey and it was just him and his bad leg and the same old sound of his breath rasping inside the bicycle mask. As he passed beneath Tower Bridge he thought he heard laughter and song. But he also heard gunfire and screaming, further south. The laughter and song died pretty quickly after that.
He stood on the pier and looked out at the lapping river. Rat Island rose out of it like a swollen belly from cold bathwater. He saw people moving over the great built-up mound of wreckage, looking for food, or for relatives. Bivouacs dotted this artificial island; people emerged from tunnels like maggots from bad apples.
Jane called out: ‘Hey!’
Faces turned to the river bank. Most went back to their rooting; one man cupped his mouth and asked for a name.
‘Richard Jane. I have news.’
The man untied a simple boat from a post and rowed his way over to where Jane stood. He was short and bald, his head strangely large on top of his wasted body, like an unsucked lollipop. He introduced himself as Jon Petersen, a printer from Bergen, Norway who had moved to London to live with his English wife who owned a luggage shop in Nunhead. His wife had disappeared during the Event while Petersen had been in the centre of town, travelling on the Tube, shopping for her birthday presents.
‘How many are you?’ Jane asked.
Petersen looked back at the island. ‘There are a few hundred here,’ he said. ‘It’s a hellish stink, but we feel safe. Skinners don’t go swimming. And the rats we can cope with. They make good eating, if you can catch them. You have to fast them first, though, for a few days or they’re bitter.’
Jane saw the rats moving briskly across the skin of the island, surefooted and sleek, as if they were on rails. They did not seem as fat or aggressive as they used to be. Everything that had survived was losing weight. He was coming to see the raft as a last chance.
He told Petersen what he knew and the other man listened without speaking, constantly licking his already wet lips so that Jane could not take his eyes from them; they resembled the flesh of cherries.
‘A raft,’ Petersen said, when Jane was finished. ‘In the water?’
Jane nodded. ‘There are people on the way now.’
‘I saw them. I wondered what was happening.’
‘Head for the south-east,’ Jane said. ‘Tell your people.’
‘The water,’ Petersen said again. He seemed troubled as he pushed the boat off for the island. He kept looking into the river around him, as if it contained things that he found suddenly unpalatable.
Jane felt liberated. He had done what had been asked of him. Everyone in London who hadn’t struck out on their own had been made aware of the existence of the raft. The city was emptying. Now he hoped that the screams and howls he could hear belonged to the Skinners as the streets turned lonely and the houses grew used to the ageing echoes of human voices.
He watched Petersen tie the boat off at the platform. A crowd quickly grew around the Norwegian. Jane waved once to them, turned his back, and headed for the Old Kent Road.
After about an hour he heard little footsteps slapping through the wet, struggling to keep up.
‘Hello, Stanley.’
‘Hiya, Dad.’
‘Where’ve you been?’ He was tempted to look to his side, but he didn’t want the illusion to vanish just yet. It was enough to see the blue stripe of Stanley’s pyjamas in his peripheral vision, the arc of his arm as he swung Walter up and down. He had walked the length of the A2; New Cross Gate was ahead, then Lewisham and the A20 that would take him into Kent. The crippled expanse of superstores lay around them like so many crushed sardine cans.
‘You sticking to the road, Dad?’
‘Yeah, why? I’ll probably catch up with more people before long. It’ll be safer then.’
‘Safer? How?’
He wanted to reach out and plant his hand on the boy’s hair, feel the heat of his scalp run through his fingers. Drop his hand to Stanley’s slender neck, feel the muscles shift against each other under the impossible soft skin.
‘You’ve heard of safety in numbers haven’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Well. It means the more of you there are, the less afraid you need to be.’
‘I think that’s a load of rubbish.’
Jane stopped. He checked behind him, but there were no refugees. The road was empty. It had been preying on his thoughts; he believed that by now he would either have caught up with a convoy, or been assimilated by one joining the A2 at any of the main junctions.
He no longer wanted to look down at Stanley, but not because he was concerned the boy would fragment and drift apart, like desert cloud. He was scared. Stanley’s eyes, what he could make out from the corner of his own, were too large for his head, too dark. His voice had faltered, but it was not the change in vocal cords you would expect from a boy who was in his fifteenth year. It was slurred, scorched, splintered. It had been interfered with in some way. Now he suspected that the way Stanley kinked his neck to look up to his father was no longer some endearing facet of his behaviour but an enforced failing in his physicality, a terrible injury.