CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Normally I don’t watch the news. It’s either really boring, about things I don’t understand, like politics and interest rates and the Eurozone, or it’s full of horrible, scary stories about people getting bashed, beaten, brutalized, butchered or blown up.

I mean, frankly I don’t know why they put it on. They’re either mad or they think everyone else is mad. No one but a psychopath could enjoy it. And it’s not just once a week, like most programmes, but every single day. Several times a day in fact. The whole thing’s insane.

But what I’m leading up to is that on this particular day I did settle down on the sofa at six o’clock with a Coke and a slice of pizza and, just for a change, switched on the news. I knew no crimes would have been committed now that everyone was nice, so I was curious to see what they’d fill the programme with.

The newsreader, an Asian guy with a pink tie with purple swirls on it, was all happy and smiley. ‘Today’s extraordinary story, which is being confirmed from all around the world, is that, for the first time in human history, a day has passed on which nobody seems to have died, anywhere on the globe. Not one death has been recorded in the last twenty-four hours in any hospital in the United Kingdom. The story is the same throughout the European Union, and other countries are confirming the same remarkable phenomenon. Angela Crudgington reports.’

Cut to a woman with a mike, standing outside a big hospital with a stationary fleet of ambulances in the background. The wind whipped her blonde hair about her face. Another Asian guy in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck was standing beside her. ‘I’m at Whipps Cross, the largest hospital in East London, with a patient population of some three thousand people and many times that number of outpatients, as well as a busy A&E department which sees around two hundred patients a day. In a normal twenty-four-hour period, doctors say the hospital would expect to lose two or three patients. But no one has died since yesterday. A freak statistic – or evidence of something far more mysterious?

‘I have with me the very charming, intelligent and handsome Dr Wickramasinghe – he really is a great guy, there’s no question about that.’ She pushed the mike under the doctor’s nose. ‘Dr Wickramasinghe – how do you account for this?’

Dr Wickramasinghe said, ‘Thanks, Angela. I’d just like to say first of all that you are an extremely good-looking and talented interviewer! Well, we can’t account for it at this stage. If this hospital alone was involved, I’d say we’d just had a good day – it’s not unheard of to have a twenty-four-hour period in which no one dies. But two things make this very strange indeed. First, several colleagues have told me of individual cases involving terminally ill patients who really seemed unlikely to make it through this last day, but every single one of them has hung on. But second, and this is the truly amazing thing, it appears that no hospital in the country or – and this seems frankly incredible – in the world has reported any deaths for this period. That’s got to be more than just a freak statistic.’

‘So what’s your explanation?’

‘That’s a great question, Angela. But I don’t have an explanation.’

‘Could it be that, well, people have just stopped dying? We might all live for ever?’

‘Well, that’s impossible, of course.’

‘So what’s the explanation then?’

‘I told you, I don’t have one.’

The interviewer looked a bit kind of nonplussed. ‘This is Angela Crudgington in East London. Back to you in the studio, Martin.’

‘Thank you, Angela. I have with me the very intelligent and extremely nice population expert Dr Timothy Wendover, from the University of East Anglia.’

The guy with him looked like a typical eccentric professor, with a wild, unruly beard and a small pair of glasses which sat crookedly on his nose. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I really like your tie, by the way. That’s a very attractive pattern, good choice.’

‘Thanks very much. It’s really kind of you. So, Dr Wendover, this is something quite unprecedented, isn’t it?’

‘It is totally unprecedented. Usually, something of the order of forty thousand people die, worldwide, every hour. The idea that even for an hour nobody would die is frankly bizarre – and a whole day seems outright impossible. And yet that is apparently the case. Assuming these early reports are reliable. And they do seem to be.’

‘So it has come as a total surprise – there were no indications of a decrease in death rates prior to this?’

The professor swept the suggestion away with both hands and his glasses slipped down his nose a bit further. ‘Not at all. In fact, there has actually been an upward trend in deaths per day, as the world population continues to grow. This has come out of nowhere and we have no way of accounting for it.’

‘Could it be connected with improved medical care – better medicines and hygiene standards . . .?’

‘That’s a very smart suggestion,’ said Dr Wendover. ‘It was clever of you to make it and I hope you won’t be offended when I say that can’t be the explanation. In the first place, the change is far too sudden and extreme to be explained in that way. And in the second place, rates of illness and accident haven’t changed. It’s not as if everyone has suddenly got better. People who were terminally ill yesterday are still terminally ill. People all over the world were admitted to hospital after car crashes and other accidents, many with terrible injuries which would normally be fatal – but somehow nobody died.’

That made me feel a bit queasy. I hadn’t thought of that. All those people lying in intensive care who by rights should have been dead, hanging on to life when they maybe didn’t even want to. That hadn’t occurred to me when I made the wish.

‘Some have suggested that something miraculous has occurred,’ the newsreader was saying. ‘That a profound change has taken place and humans are no longer mortal. It sounds far-fetched, I know, but could there be any possibility . . .?’

‘Good question. You’re right to pose it. An event as bizarre as this naturally encourages us to seek bizarre explanations. But it is of course impossible that we could have become immortal, unless the laws of biology have all been cancelled.’

‘But suppose that had happened – would that be good news for the human race?’

Dr Wendover looked serious and sorrowful. ‘You might think so, and believe me I understand why you might think that. But if true, that would be an utter disaster.’

I leant forward a bit. What did he mean, an utter disaster?

‘You see, while death rates have stopped – at least temporarily – birth rates have not,’ Dr Wendover went on. ‘So the world’s population would rise very, very fast indeed. Soon there would be food shortages. Water shortages. Shortages of resources. But still no one would die. People who were starving would simply carry on starving. But not dying. And because illness has not stopped either, you’d have lots of people suffering from disease, but the disease would never kill them. They’d just carry on suffering for eternity. It would, in fact, be hell on Earth.’

He was so upset by this prospect that he burst into tears.

So did the newsreader.

And so did I.

I’d screwed up with that last wish. Big-time. I hadn’t meant to cause all these problems.

Problems.

Problems.

Problems were the problem, weren’t they?

A light bulb went on above my head.

What if there were no more problems?

Through my sobs, I said, ‘I wish there were no more problems in the world!’

And then everything went quiet.