Gravity has outlined its agenda.
Urgent hoofing noises thunder in the corridor outside the Temple.
– She knew all along, murmurs Wesley Pike. The echo of the machine’s high shriek still rings in his ears. Treachery tastes like sour iron in his mouth. She knew. Knew, and knew he’d buy whatever she said, knew he’d buy it because he was used to buying and it was all about buying.
His heart twists as he reaches for the lever that calls a halt. The software has already taken up office in the United States and it’s over for Atlantica, it’s been over for a long time, so whatever gesture he makes – the only gesture left – can mean nothing.
It’s a smooth, cool, decisive slide. It’s the work of a second.
It means nothing. It means everything.
When it’s done, he is surprised to find himself a man again.
Bewildered faces turn to catch the last rays of the dying sun, and we breathe deep, inhaling the peppermint breeze that bears the ugly lurch of grief. The sky swarms and buzzes with helicopters peeling away from the city, thistledowning in all directions. There’s a loud boom, and then a protracted honk from the funnel as the gangways lift.
Minutes later, to the sound of screaming panic, the ship has pulled slowly out from the dock and Fishook is steering eastwards from our steadily crumbling shore. As we leave the estuary behind, the waves in our wake seem to foam and curdle and the cloud-mass above us echoes with the high thin cries of the island we’re abandoning. Gradually, the darkening silhouette of Harbourville grows smaller and more precarious, shuddering to a pinprick in the gusting wind.
Hannah and I stand in silence, in the first clobbered stages of shock, the tears running freely down our cheeks. On the horizon, the sunset glows a hectic red, fringed with the toxic blue haze of an all-seeing sky, and from the distant island, an orange-and-blue firework bursts and blossoms across the bubbling seascape, filling the sky with a fierce and bloody light.
I’ll never lose sight of this tiny, intense split second, this little numb splinter of grace. The future is rushing in to swamp us, I can already feel the concave ache of it. I have no idea where we will sail to now, or where the human world is headed. But I know there is more gullibility than wisdom and more greed than kindness and more darkness than hope and more fine wares than anyone can ever pay for.
How easy we are to seduce.
Survival is our burden and our treasure.
Our treasure: a tiny guttering beacon in the whirling sea.
Let us not sink.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Michel Coleman, Polly Coles, Malcolm Dancy, Jane Dorner, John Hands, Humphrey Hawksley, Valerie Jensen, Kate O’Riordan, Charles Palliser, David Shriver; thank you.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (long-listed for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize), War Crimes for the Home (long-listed for the Orange Prize), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, currently in development as a major motion picture by Anthony Minghella, and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.
Also available by the same author
Charlotte supports herself and her lumpen side-kick, Fru Schleswig, as a prostitute in fin-de-siècle Copenhagen. But the course of harlotry never runs smooth, and Charlotte’s life is altered irrevocably when, one hard winter, she stumbles on an exciting new source of income. A dark mansion, home to the disagreeable Fru Krak, is in dire need of a top-to-bottom scrub – and the wealthy widow is hiring.
Transformed into cleaning ladies, the squabbling duo attack the dark abode – but soon discover that mysteries abound. The basement appears to be haunted, and there are rumours of desperate souls entering it – never to emerge. Meanwhile there have been odd sightings of the dead Professor Krak, master of physics, walking the streets as a ghost. Charlotte decides to turn detective – but finds herself outwitted by the mysterious controller of a demonic Machine which wastes no time in catapulting her and Fru Schleswig into the baffling world of twenty-first-century London. And beyond…
ALSO AVAILABLE BY LIZ JENSEN
In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. And when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. A haunting story of human passion and burning faith, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind’s self-destruction in a world on the brink.
‘An end-of-days blockbuster to haunt your nightmares… Unputdownable’
Since the year all British women became infertile, Bobby Sullivan’s London veterinary clinic has been packed with primate ‘children’ and, speaking as an alpha male, he’s sick to death of them. Hoping to reincarnate himself, he moves north, but finds there is no escape from the Darwinian imperative – or from the sexual pull of the luscious twins Rose and Blanche. As the legacy of the girls’ ancestor, Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, begins to connect with a century of history, religion, and evolutionary theory, new hope looms for the nation’s future. Pointing the finger of destiny firmly at Bobby…
‘Superb… A complex, intelligent novel which draws upon a vast array of ideas without ever losing coherence… magnificently crowded, wonderfully funny fiction’
Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child. He’s bright, precocious, deceitful and dangerously, disturbingly accident prone. On a family day out it seems almost predestined that something will happen. But this time it is worse than anyone imagined. When Louis falls over a cliff into a ravine and lapses into a deep coma, his father vanishes and his mother is paralysed by shock. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness, but the boy defies medical logic and the doctor is drawn into the dark heart of Louis’ buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery and he can’t communicate. Or can he?
‘A wonderfully unsettling psychological thriller’
‘You know what they say about GIs and English girls’ knickers,’ ran the wartime joke, ‘One Yank and they’re off.’ When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn’t normally do – evil things, some of them – because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it’s payback time. In her old folks’ home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed and love.