“You mind where you’s stepping, Lovey!” a woman shrieked as Jennifer nearly unbalanced the pile of things she was carrying on her head. She tried to apologise, but stood transfixed by the pattern of tribal scars that gleamed on the woman’s face. According to her father, more than half the Londoners bulldozed into the Hills of the Dead had been black. Perhaps by accident, perhaps by design, blacks had suffered terribly in The Hunger, and worse in The Pacification. Her one London trip since The Break had been confined to the absolute centre—here, just about everyone had been white. It was a shock, after so long, to see so many black faces. She stepped back, and someone swore loudly behind her. She gripped hard on her handlebars and pushed her way deeper into the crowd. Never mind the incidentals of colour—after so many days, when she’d heard nothing but the twittering of birds and the murmured conversations of slow-moving travellers, the loud babble of voices and the hum of treadmill-powered generators was a shock she had to fight hard to overcome. So too the omnipresent smell of coal smoke and of unwashed humanity. She ignored the reek of close-packed, sweaty bodies. She skirted the crowds of drunks reeling from every pub. She hurried past the piteous beggars and the raucous whores of every age and sex.
The noise and bustle were alarming, and they were reassuring. Half a dozen times, she’d stopped after leaving the M25 flyover, and looked back into the gloom. She’d had no impression of being followed along the road. There had been no sound of a helicopter overhead. Nor, even before the brighter stars vanished into the smog, did she see one of those surveillance balloons that she’d heard kept London sealed off and in an uneasy peace. Unless one of the armed officers who kept order here took it into his mind to stop her, she was probably safer in every way that counted than since she’d cycled out of Deal.
At first, Deptford Broadway seemed impassable. Its wide expanse was crowded with stalls selling everything from fire tongs to used notebook computers. Here, the hum of generators was joined by the throbbing of factory machinery that, like the markets it fed, worked day and night. But, keeping her head down, and mindful of hands that, might at any moment, flutter against her tight backpack and the zipped pockets of her anorak, she pressed slowly forward.
There was a spot patrol where the Broadway narrowed and gave way to the darkness of the New Cross Road. Here, the police were checking identity cards. Jennifer heard the crackle of radios just in time, and was able to dodge without drawing attention to herself into the queue at a food stall. Here, £30 bought what was described as a hamburger. Its inner part might contain traces of something that was once alive and breathing, but seemed mostly to be the grey, industrial protein nowadays fed to the poor.
So the speakers beside the stall blared every minute or so, while the cracked video screen flashed random colours and the occasional picture of contented enjoyment. Some kind of grease dribbling off his chin, a man stood opposite her and raised his own circular mass of nourishment in a gesture of friendship. Jennifer looked away and took another bite of her pseudo-hamburger. The bun itself had the dry taste of flour bulked out with chalk dust. This made the grease that leaked from the compressed sausage a useful lubricant. It was food of a sort, and she chewed grimly on the thing as she glanced sideways at the endless checking of documents. The side road that might have led her round was sealed with rubble. She thought of the map she’d inspected at home. If she forced herself back to the main junction, she might get onto the wide road that hugged the Thames. But would this be any easier to get through?
“You t’ieving raasclarth!” the stall holder suddenly yelled at an old woman who was stuffing one of the burgers into her mouth. “You tek dese back and wipe you’s ass!” He held up one of the notes she’d given him and ripped it across. Someone behind her in the queue laughed. Someone else called out in anger at the delay. All about, there was a sudden chatter of interest and of disapproval. The chance of a disturbance brought two of the officers over. The crowd parted to let them swagger through. Jennifer pulled herself and her bicycle out of their sight. But the police weren’t interested in her. A few words from the stall holder, and the bigger officer got the old woman across the shoulders with his long club. As she went down, still frantically pushing food into her mouth, both officers set properly about her. Concentrating on her own food, poor as it was, took Jennifer’s mind off the woman’s rapidly animalistic screams and the shouts of encouragement from the crowd that had closed round.
It was as the screams ended, and the police began cocking their rifles to bring the crowd into order, that Jennifer felt a gentle pressure on her backpack. She twisted round, knife in hand. “Don’t want no friction!” the spotty boy whined. He raised his hands and stepped back onto the heaps of rubbish that blocked the pavements here. He managed a single step onto the soft debris, before sprawling onto his back. His head splashed inside the foot thickness of wet filth. What may have been animal or human excrement soaked into his matted hair, he grinned, and raised his hands in another gesture of peace. “No friction, mate!”
Jennifer looked at him. Though smaller than her, he had the wiry look of the underclass. A year of reduced nutrition might have done nothing to abolish the difference of speed and strength between them. She set her face like stone and put her knife away. Slowly, she backed into the crowd. One of the officers was laughing into his radio. The other was poking his rifle at anyone who came too close by the unmoving heap that had been human. The officers at the checkpoint had, for the moment, given up on asking for documents, and were straining for their own look at the body. She pushed her way under cover of a wall that was bulging out the higher it rose, and crept past into the dark silence that lay beyond Deptford Broadway.
It was half a mile to the top of the next hill. Jennifer was soon used to the comparative silence. She stopped at the double junction with Lewisham Way, and rested on the edge of one of the places that must have been flattened in the Pacification. A year before, when the news reports hadn’t yet lost touch with reality, the fires in a dozen cities had flared nightly on every television screen that still worked. Safe in a house stuffed with food, and with shotgun ever loaded, Jennifer had sat with her parents and watched the beginning of the new order of things. Long before genuine footage was dropped in favour of gushing descriptions of “wartime spirit” in the Cotswolds, word of mouth reporting had taken over the function of the news. Then, she’d heard of the mass shootings and the transporting of multitudes to work on the recreation of Ireland as a gigantic penal colony and food plantation.
But that was a year ago. All that marked the last stand of the hungry was the space cleared by the bombing. Even this was now being filled in by workshops to employ the poor and provide England with some of the things it had been thought the rest of the world would always send in exchange for a complex shuffling of paper. Here was a place of manufacture, not of selling, and Jennifer could now set out along a road that was mostly empty and where, from behind every bricked-up shop window, and from every old university building, came the endless hum of machinery. Twice, she passed over railway bridges and was aware of the low, continuous rumble of wagons that fed and were fed by the ceaseless whirr of steam-powered generators and machinery.