Krystal – Thursday: Plague Day
Nothing moved. The city was swimming in a dirty fog that covered every street and every body and made the tops of the crashed cars look like hundreds of tiny islands. The fog stretched from Shepherds Bush to Limehouse and got closer every second. And everywhere it went, those stupid enough to hang around dropped like drunks on a heavy night out.
Ed had stopped watching. He was sitting with some of the others in a circle, talking about stuff. She’d tuned in a moment ago and it sounded like they were talking about their lives. What made them happy, what they liked doing at the weekends, all the sorts of things people spoke about when the ship they were on started sinking.
Part of her longed to join in, but she thought sharing her best begging stories and ‘escaping being sexually harassed by overweight businessmen’ stories probably wasn’t the escapism they were looking for. So she stayed by the window and watched.
On a whim, she wandered across the tower and peered out the other side. The M25, the colossal circular motorway that surrounded London, was deadlocked, covered in stationary cars. The roads leading out of London were quiet, now, though they’d been heaving earlier. For everyone who’d died in the centre, many more had escaped.
They should escape. Why were they sitting up here, waiting to die? She knew the answer to that. They were scared. It wasn’t something she’d admitted to much before, despite the last three years of her life being pretty much one big scary movie. A dull one, but scary nonetheless. But she’d spent the last hour or so trying hard not to wet herself and the tops of her jeans were darkened from where she was wiping the sweat off her hands.
The fog was getting closer and maybe if they’d gone the moment it happened, they might have felt safe but now there was no chance. Why had they stayed? She’d seen this before. Some terrible disaster happened, the first thing was people panicking and running and screaming. But they’d all just watched, eyes wide and hands gripping the railing as half of London was killed by some mysterious attack. Would it come up here?
A man came from behind the counter and handed her a cup of tea, leaning against the railing and staring out. ‘Bad traffic, huh?’
‘Oh yeah, they’re gonna be pissed about that.’
He gave her a weak look and she thought for a moment he was going to cry.
‘Thanks for the tea?’
‘Hey, why not? Why are we still here?’
She laughed and blew on her tea. ‘Yeah, I was wondering that. My excuse is I don’t have a TV, so this is the first chance I’ve had to watch anything like this. What’s yours?’
‘I had tea to serve.’
‘Oh yeah, it’s all about the job. What do you really want to do?’
‘Live through this?’
Why had she asked him? What was she going to say if he asked her the same thing? At least he’d given her an out.
‘How about you?’
‘Yeah the same. You know, stay alive, get back to my cardboard box in one piece.’
‘What?’
‘Oh yeah, I’m homeless. This is the longest I’ve been in a building in, like, years.’
‘Good that’s terrible. Why?’
‘Why haven’t I been in any buildi—’
‘No, I mean, why are you homeless?’
She looked at him a little more closely. He was young. Not as young as her but not as old as she’d thought. Maybe eighteen. He looked really young, but the eighteen year olds she hung around with all looked forty so maybe he was older than he looked.
‘You really wanna know?’
He nodded earnestly and for a moment she felt sorry for him. He hadn’t seen anything of the real world. This place up here, far above it all was like a model for his life. What did he do? Student maybe? Learning shit that made no real difference to anyone. Had he ever even met a homeless person before?
But he had soft eyes and looked genuinely interested.
‘My dad started touching me. Nothing much at first, then he wanted to share baths and stuff and I was twelve and just had my first period and I knew it was creepy. So I told mum and she laughed at me and told me not to be ridiculous. Told her again and she got angry and sent me to my room. Told the school counsellor and somehow mum got blamed so I was living with dad. He left me alone for a bit, then started with it again so I ran away.’
His face changed. He had these smooth cheeks that were hollowed slightly and flushed with little red sunbursts beneath soft eyes that wanted to ignore what she was saying. He wanted to pretend it wasn’t true, only he couldn’t. So instead he stared at her like he could heal with just a look. Krystal kept herself from sneering and stared right back.
‘Why didn’t your mum believe you?’
‘She already knew. She just wasn’t willing to change her life. She thought dad was this golden person and even when she had the chance to shop him, she took the blame and went away. She’s just as messed up as he is. Was. I don’t know them anymore.’
The man nodded again and sipped his tea. His hand shook and she wondered if it was to do with what she’d said or the fact that far below them, the ponds that surrounded the building were filling slowly with fog. The circle was still going, filling the room with the soft murmurs of misplaced hope. She didn’t know why she was so sure it wouldn’t help.
The idea of dying being not so bad if you were with someone, or believing in something made her want to vomit. Dying was dying, same as cold was cold and hungry was hungry. Who cared if you told other people about it before you went?
The guy with the tea stared down at the ground as the fog sent exploratory tendrils around the base of the building. She nudged him.
‘It won’t reach us up here, will it?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t see why it should. Doesn’t seem to be coming up at all. I suppose there’s always the air con—’
His face went white. She’d always thought that was a bad description, like, no one’s face went white. But he looked like someone had shoved a vacuum cleaner somewhere and sucked the blood out of him. His tea hit the floor and he raced across the room.
The people in the circle barely noticed, so Krystal ran after him, dumping her own tea on a table. He rushed into the corridor and down to the lift where he hammered at the button, swearing under his breath.
‘Hey, hold on, what’s up?’
‘The air con, the bloody air con. It’ll circulate air all round the building. If the fog gets in down there, the air con’ll bring it up here.’
‘Oh.’ She realised just then she’d been somehow thinking they were safe. She’d imagined them sitting it out, far above the Earth and emerging unscathed into a new world, where things like homelessness didn’t matter any more. How the hell had she done that? She had though and now it was crumbling in her mind.
‘What do we do?’
‘Try and switch the air con off.’
‘Do you know how to do that?’
He shrugged and let out a breath as the lift arrived. As they descended he kept thumping his hand against the wall. ‘Why didn’t I think of it earlier, bloody sodding dammit.’
‘Well, you did have tea to serve.’
It brought him up short and he looked at her. He was on the verge of tears again, but at the earnest look on her face, he burst out laughing instead. It was an uncomfortable sound, like he was trying to convince himself something was funny, but it was better than the crying or the thumping.
The doors slid open and she followed him down the corridor. The place was deserted. Why had no one come up and got them? Maybe down here it was the more normal disaster scenario; everyone for themselves. He ran straight behind the reception desk and into the room beyond.
She glanced around before following, expecting someone to jump out and demand to know what she was doing. There was no one though. The glass doors at the front showed a scene like something from a Frank Herbert book. The fog was dense and carried tiny black particles, so it looked almost like smoke. And it was coming closer every second.
Swearing emerged from behind her and she ran into the room. The guy stood beside a huge grey box mounted on the wall. He had it open and within were hundreds of switches. There was a diagram on the back of the door but it made no sense to her and from the look on his face, none to him either.
They stood side by side staring at the switches.
‘You sure one of these is the air con?’
‘Pretty certain. Not completely, but pretty.’
‘Shall we just switch all of them then?’
He looked at her, eyebrows trying to escape into his hair. ‘This is the lights and all the power. No more tea.’
‘I can live without tea.’
She reached out, not giving him a chance to argue and flicked the bottom right switch. Nothing happened so she started on the rest. After a moment’s pause, he joined her, starting from the top. They had nearly met in the middle before the lights went out.
There were no windows in the room and it was utter darkness. Feeling really stupid, she asked, ‘you still there?’
‘Yeah. I can’t hear the air con any more.’
‘So we did it?’
‘I think so. We should go into the lobby, there’ll be some light there. Oh hey, I’m James.’
‘Krystal. Blame my parents.’
He chuckled and they started to cross the room. She put her hand out as her foot caught on something and it landed on his arm. She clutched it and he moved until their hands met. Without another word, they took baby steps across the room, accompanied by the thumps and thuds as they walked into desks or chairs or a hundred other things she’d paid no attention to on the way in.
She sniffed. There was the weirdest smell, like mold. She’d slept on enough cardboard boxes to recognise the scent of something rotting. It smelt damp as well, like her hair after a frost. James’s hand tightened in hers and she squeezed back. It got tighter still and cold and when she tried to pull free, he clung on, hand fixed in place.
Then she heard a thump and he fell and pulled her down with him.
Next Instalment Monday 22nd September
