Typically for the posh establishments, residents of Journey’s End progressed through three tiers. To begin with, if you could dress, wash, and feed yourself, and you were not incontinent or noticeably away with the fairies, you could live in a private flat, to which you were welcome to import your own furniture, wall hangings, and knickknacks. As medical needs escalated, you shifted to a more hands-on situation with greater assistance, and then finally to full-time nursing care. Residents in the last tier were not, Kay noted, trotted out to meet prospective customers. Their tour guide merely opened a door and closed it again, eager to move rapidly on to the in-house cinema.
Talking up Journey’s End as if it were a swanky country club, the more independent residents Kay and Cyril met tended to be highly educated professionals or successful entrepreneurs, so the social situation seemed promising. Though the fees were eye-watering, there was a waiting list—to which, were they to put down a substantial deposit, the Wilkinsons were free to add their names.
“I’m afraid I’m having second thoughts,” Kay confessed at the kitchen table in Lambeth on return from the visit to Aldeburgh. “I mean, I’ve little doubt that Journey’s End is the best we’re likely to do. The facilities are fabulous, it’s clean, and the staff seem personable. But I still found it depressing.”
“Well, there’s no getting round what it is,” Cyril said.
“Exactly. I realize now that what bothered me about my mother’s care home wasn’t the cheap architecture and the bad food. However you disguise it, these establishments are warehouses for the pre-dead. With bars on the windows or chintz curtains, the residents are still battery hens being farmed for fees.”
“I thought you were the one advocating that we be pragmatic, and face the future squarely, rather than lying to ourselves like everyone else.”
“I still think there’s merit to planning ahead and preparing for exigencies. We should probably keep that long-term care insurance just in case, even if the premiums are getting larcenous. But maybe there’s such a thing as being too far-sighted, and skipping to the rubbish bit of our lives before we have to. We’re not old yet, by most people’s lights. Maybe we shouldn’t push the programme.”
“That administrator at Journey’s End was very clear on the dangers of putting the move off for too long and deteriorating to the point that we won’t be admitted,” Cyril reminded her. “She said, ‘Beware the five-minutes-to-twelve syndrome,’ remember? It’s the same mistake everyone seems to make, because they don’t realize that five minutes to twelve is basically twelve.”
“Maybe waiting so long that we miss out on a five-star funeral parlour is a risk worth taking. I’d rather have more good life, in which we control who our friends are and what we have for dinner, even if that means at the tail end we land in some geriatric madhouse doing the hokey cokey in wheelchairs.”
“There is a whole movement that advocates ‘ageing in place.’”
“I’m all for it,” Kay said emphatically. “I like it here. I’ve put loads of work into this house. The conservatory is exquisite. I’m thrilled with the trailing orchid wallpaper in the sitting room. I want us to keep our garden. I want to pour myself a second glass of red wine without having some officious matron whisk it away because it isn’t good for me.”
“There’s still the danger that I whisk it away,” Cyril said.
“Just try.”
In the end, they never put down that stonking deposit for Journey’s End. Giving the ritzy safe haven a miss was a gamble, but, as Kay observed, every decision we make in this life is a gamble, isn’t it?
That said, the couple did continue to organize their affairs with an eye to the future, keeping wills up to date, ensuring that the DNR directives in the event of mental vegetation were easy for the family to find, restricting their spending primarily to necessities, and investing their assets with caution. With no little sense of fiscal seasickness, they’d already survived the choppy waters of the dot-com crash and the market hysterics after 9/11. The Great Recession of 2008 proved especially worrying, because at sixty-eight Kay was just starting to draw down her private pension, which had nearly halved in value, whilst London property prices took a hit, making their six-bedroom backstop less of a consolation. But they’d no intention of selling their house and rode out the slump. The markets better than recovered, and even the financial apocalypse forecast by the Confederation of British Industries and the Bank of England in the event of a win for Leave in 2016 failed conspicuously to materialize.
Yet no investment strategy no matter how conservative could ever have countered the veritably worldwide economic shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Once the UK finally lifted the last of the restrictions on commerce and freedom of association, the much-hoped-for “V-shaped” recovery resembled a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet: a backwards J. A host of businesses had been obliterated. The welfare rolls were groaning; unemployment was sky-high. It proved a great deal easier to shut down an economy than to rev it up again.
Like most other governments, Her Majesty’s injected so much cash into benefits, interest-free loans, debt forgiveness, tax deferments, and infrastructure projects that early on in the give-away free-for-all the public lost track of the difference between “billion” and “trillion.” All very well, save that the funds for these frenetic expenditures were borrowed. When in turn central banks across the world gobbled up sovereign debt and overloaded their balance sheets with government bonds through quantitative easing—QE7, QE8, etcetera, though governors stopped bothering to number the buying binges after QE12—the money was effectively conjured from thin air. Kay didn’t understand this alchemy one bit, and often got angry with her husband for being such a bore about it. “Well, in a way all money is made up, is it not? I mean, money is an idea, a conceit. And I know you’ve explained it to me repeatedly, but I still haven’t a clue what it means to ‘monetize the debt.’”
“They don’t want you to understand it,” Cyril said miserably.
It was difficult to discern whether Cyril had grown habitually glum due to advancing age or to the gloom that had freighted the whole country ever since the likes of Trafalgar and Leicester Squares grew hushed and deserted as the moon—a gloom that had never entirely lifted, even throughout the cathartic exuberance over being allowed once and for all to actually leave your own home.
“You’re not usually such a conspiracy theorist,” Kay said.
“It’s not a conspiracy,” Cyril said, and he looked as if he could barely keep his head up. “It’s worse than that. It’s incompetence. Malfeasance on an incomprehensible scale, and all over the world at the same time.”
“Please tell me you’re not listening to that Shriver woman. She’s a hysteric. And so annoyingly smug, as if she wants civilization to collapse, just so she can be proved right. I can’t bear the sound of her voice.” There was indeed an annoying American import—another one of those Yankee anglophiles who wouldn’t go back where she came from—who kept claiming on Radio 4 that some book of hers had predicted the whole debacle now supposedly well underway. A handful of deluded groupies regarded the hyperventilating loon as a modern-day Nostradamus. But apparently the lady’s stupid novel, The Madrigal or something, which Kay had zero interest in reading, made no mention of any pandemic, and the self-promotional author was obviously just trying to flog more copies with her irresponsible alarmism.
Throughout the 2020s, governments spent money like there was no tomorrow, but with all this pump-pump-pumping something didn’t quite work. Collectively, these unrelenting rescue packages, tax holidays, universal-income experiments, and industry bailouts recalled the commonplace experience of inflating a bicycle tyre whose tube, unbeknownst to you, has a small hole in it. So you can depress the handle of the floor pump over and over, but the tyre never quite gets resiliently firm, and the moment you give the project a rest because surely that’s sufficient, the tyre starts gradually to go soft again. Under pressure, too, small holes become larger holes, until eventually you frantically push and pull and push and pull, and the tyre sits flat on the pavement.
Kay didn’t understand quantitative easing, but she did understand when the cost of Marmite—even more beloved as national metaphor than as spread on toast—doubled, then tripled. Although their NHS pensions were inflation-adjusted, official inflation rates from the Office of National Statistics grievously lagged reality on the street, and in due course the once-generous direct deposits barely covered the food bill. Then they didn’t cover the food bill. Without abetting their income with private pensions, they’d be going hungry. But the markets, long anaemic, were sliding to worse than anaemic, and the Wilkinsons’ pension pots were shrinking, too. To make matters worse, the elimination of cash had facilitated negative interest rates, meant to force “hoarders”—formerly known as “savers,” who could no longer irately empty a bank account and flounce off with stacks of notes in a sack—to spend their selfish stash and so juice the economy. A hundred quid on the first of the month by the last became ninety-nine.
In the end, it was all a waste. The saving, the balancing of their portfolios, the penny-pinching and buying toothpaste on offer—all that painstaking preparation for an independent old age, the better to burden neither family nor the state. The couple had done everything right. They hadn’t blown their assets prematurely on extravagant holidays or—as the tabloids had claimed the gaga elderly would all splash out on when foolishly allowed access to their own retirement funds—Lamborghinis. They’d bought their house at a provident time and paid off the mortgage. They’d both worked well past the point at which they might have comfortably retired. Besides their hard-earned pensions, neither had drawn on the public purse; to the contrary, they’d paid sizable tax bills without complaint. They’d put aside as much as possible for the rainy day presently gathering into a monsoon, yet increasingly their monthly income could barely purchase a tin of Baxters butternut squash soup and a packet of builder’s tea. Even that long-term care insurance: the company went bust, so all those hefty premiums had bought them no more security than anyone else enjoyed—meaning none. Kay and Cyril Wilkinson discovered for themselves that there was only one thing worse than being very, very old: being very, very old and broke.
* * *
Frail but all there, both Kay and Cyril were proving remarkably long-lived. If, as news presenters compulsively observed, extended life expectancy was a stroke of great good fortune for everyone, enduring into their late nineties made the couple luckier than most. But were they lucky? As matters unfolded, this question was not as easy to answer as all that.
When Cyril turned one hundred years old on the twenty-second of January 2039, no one from the royal family sent a birthday card. That might have been because Buckingham Palace, along with all the other royal residences like Windsor Castle, was by then occupied by “asylum seekers” from a wide range of nationalities. For history, alas, does not instruct problems to politely wait their turn, even in a country with a reputation for revering the queue. Thus, on top of a Western-wide financial implosion that made the Great Depression seem like a pet death, the tide of tourists-for-life now rolling up from the global south made Europe’s “migration crisis” of 2015 seem like a school field trip. Accurate numbers were impossible to come by, and anyone who claimed to know even roughly how many migrants had stormed the continent by foot, lorry, plane, and boat clearly had a political agenda. Leftists claimed that only a few million had breached the continent’s borders, whilst much-demonized nativists were equally certain that the total well exceeded a billion souls. Just as they’d thrown up their hands when trying to keep track of “billions” versus “trillions” in government spending, most of the public settled on “a lot.”
Many Britons who could afford to be charitable donated clothing, disposable nappies, bags of penne, and jars of pesto to support the incomers. The most considerable hostility to the influx was amongst first- and second-generation immigrants, sometimes from the very countries this more recent wave had fled. Having made it across the English Channel in time, Pakistanis, Afghans, Hindus, and Nigerians all demanded that the UK pull up the drawbridge. Yet the “drawbridge” in this instance was a useless figure of speech, and unless Britain was willing to come to the unacceptable conclusion that the unending flotilla of boats from France and Belgium was a military matter—in Turkey, troops had been ordered to shoot migrants on sight—policy decisions were nugatory. Besides, British bureaucracy was one of the last casualties of the onslaught, so that for the first few years every incomer was duly registered for a pittance of a weekly stipend, provided housing until there wasn’t any, assigned a taxpayer-financed lawyer, strictly instructed not to work, and allowed to appeal denied asylum claims up to seven times. Any threat of deportation was empty bluster. Rather than remove the asylum seekers, it would have been cheaper and more logistically feasible to evacuate the English.
Meanwhile, the NHS, whose budget had so ballooned that the standing joke about Britain having become “a health service with a country attached” was no longer funny, was so inundated that doctors reminisced nostalgically about the coronavirus pandemic, when they’d naively had no idea what the word “overwhelmed” really meant.
“Being hospitable is the least we can do,” Cyril maintained early in the surge, then predicted to soon subside. “Climate change is largely the West’s fault. We’re reaping what we sowed, so we’ll simply have to move over and make room.”
“Sorry,” Kay said. “Europe, North America, and Australia have reduced fossil fuel emissions to practically nothing. Pounding one more nail in our economic coffin, we’ve bent over backwards to reach carbon neutrality by 2050—another one of those distant years that was never supposed to actually arrive, and now it’s right round the corner. Meanwhile, China, India, and Southeast Asia have been churning out emissions to beat the band—”
“You can’t blame poorer nations for wanting, and deserving, a Western lifestyle, bab.”
“You’ve got to be joking!” Kay exploded. “We’re living on mouldy toast. What ‘Western lifestyle’?”
“If the UK weren’t a massive improvement on their wretched circumstances, these benighted refugees would never attempt the perilous journey across the Channel.” Even in these early days, Cyril’s soothing liberal platitudes had begun to assume the demented singsong of a nursery rhyme.
“I’m not convinced it is all climate change,” Kay grumbled. “Or even primarily climate change. Africa and the Middle East are mostly desert, and they’ve always been desert. Those climates were abysmal even when I was a little girl. There’ve always been droughts there, and crop failures, locusts, and famines, because it’s not a part of the world that’s ever been equipped to sustain billions of people!”
“You sound as if you’ve been poisoned by the podcasts of that bitter lunatic Calvin Piper. I don’t say this about many people, but that demographer is evil.”
“I concede the codger is unsavoury, but he may have a point. As for this knee-jerk mea culpa of yours, which means we’re supposed to just sit here whilst our country is overrun—”
“Watch your language!” Cyril said.
“What am I supposed to say? ‘Whilst our country attracts an unusual number of visitors’?”
“All right. That’s better.”
“What is our fault is curing all the diseases that once kept population growth in those parts under control.”
“Enough! You’re a nurse. What’s got into you?”
“I’ll tell you what’s got into me. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are encampments and no-go areas. You can’t walk along the South Bank for all the families huddled in blankets with cups out. And it’s not only here. In Paris, they’re all along the Seine, on the bridges, around the Eiffel Tower and clumped around the pyramid of the Louvre—whose panes they’ve all smashed. In Italy, they’ve set up tents in the Roman ruins and turned the Coliseum into a homeless shelter. There’s hardly a solvent government in Europe aside from Sweden, and Sweden only barely, because they have more visitors per capita than anybody. Even you and I can barely afford one miserable sausage between us. What’s this country supposed to do with them all?”
“You don’t talk about ‘them’ as if they’re real people,” Cyril admonished.
“They’re real as sin! But just because they’re ‘people’ doesn’t mean I’m required to like having them here!”
“I’m ashamed of you. I’ve never known you to be so selfish.” Cyril had always been one of those types—why was it always men?—who was big-hearted in relation to strangers, but often pitiless with people he knew.
“Biologically, we have to be selfish to survive,” Kay said. “Blindly altruistic cultures would die out. And what’s the purpose of a country if not to protect its people? To put the interest of citizens above the interest of outsiders? Otherwise citizenship is meaningless. If the rights of inhabitants are put on a par with the rights of everyone else in the world, there is no country.”
“The purpose of a country,” Cyril said, eyes narrowed, “especially this country, is to preserve a set of values. To which the beggar-thy-neighbour policies you’re advocating are anathema.”
“So to save Britain—which according to you means rescuing our sucker values—we have to destroy it.”
“I would rather die with integrity than thrive as a savage.”
Kay arose from the table so quickly that her chair fell backwards. “You are barking! That’s the kind of empty armchair aphorism which . . . which . . . which is fatuous, and amounts to a kind of preening. What’s going on right now all over Europe is real, not a page torn from a book of lofty political philosophy, and your response is to flatter yourself. Because we’re both over a hundred bleeding years old, and it’s getting dangerous out there!”
“Understandably. Many of these asylum seekers are desperate, and they’ll do anything to feed their children.”
“Uh-huh. And what if they thumped me over the head? To feed their children?”
“I would be sorry,” Cyril said with elaborate condescension, “but I would still be able to contextualize your misfortune.”
“I ask you: is there any limit? In your mind, is there any limit to the number of visitors this country should let in—five million, ten million, fifty million? Or is it all the-more-the-merrier to you?”
“The numbers have been grossly exaggerated,” Cyril said coldly. “I cannot emphasize my concern strongly enough. I fear you’ve been contaminated by ugly, bigoted propaganda, and that’s what’s dangerous.”
* * *
Cyril was quite right about the rise of prejudice. To the horror of most Britons, who in truth had always cared more for fairness and decency than for disciplined supermarket lines, vigilante groups multiplied. From fishing vessels, these ruffians took pot-shots at overloaded dinghies in the Channel. They beat up the undefended with cricket bats and set fire to tented encampments. When not explaining why the sudden deluge of migration was all the audience’s fault, the BBC spent the abundance of its coverage of “The Great Flood” bewailing these hideous far-right attacks in ghastly detail. What few minutes remained to Newsnight thereafter were lavished on poignant stories of individual suffering and persecution amongst the new arrivals. They were gay, from countries where homosexuality was illegal. They were transgender and denied transition surgery. They were fleeing mandatory conscription, or they’d dared voice opposition to totalitarian regimes and had narrowly survived attempts on their lives. They had escaped from endless, vicious territorial wars. Most commonly, of course, they had trekked from villages that had no water and no food, having often lost family members to starvation and poor health care. The portraits were unfailingly sympathetic, and every single one of the supplicants the corporation interviewed seemed deserving of what any human being should rightly expect: safety, sustenance, and shelter. Obviously, anyone who argued that these lovely people should be turned away was a monster.
Unencumbered by this high regard for civility amongst the British mainstream, in the end the newcomers had the advantage over the violent outliers on the home team, first due to the ruthlessness of their determination to find “a better life,” and soon due to their sheer numbers—whatever those were, as the Home Office had long ago stopped even pretending to keep track, and the Home Secretary had abandoned her cabinet post and absconded, it was rumoured, to the Hebrides. For despite repeated reports that the surge had peaked, massive caravans of pedestrians, bicycles, burrows, camels, jalopies, and overloaded coaches continued to form to Europe’s south, stretching for miles into the distance in drone footage.
Further contributing to the festivities, the anti-climate-change Extinction Rebellion, once so popular amongst affluent young white Britons, had merged with the antinomian No Lives Matter movement to become “Extinction!” full stop. Gathering a fearsome strength, the faction urged a pagan embrace of the very apocalypse that the original eco-activists had aimed to prevent. Regarding themselves as sharing common cause with the asylum seekers, these young people weren’t pummelling immigrants or torching encampments. They were smashing anything that smacked of a hoary old civilization that had had its day, and the targets of their arson were larger than tents—like the Houses of Parliament. According to Simon and Hayley, the Wilkinsons’ now-teenage great-grandchildren had joined the anarchists and were out marauding across London all night long. The UK having bred the disaffected punk scene, it made sense that the country would also give birth to an antisocial movement far less decorative and middle-class (for Britain no longer had a middle class), which quickly spread to the continent. Once the restoration of Notre Dame was finally completed for a second time, within a fortnight a rabble of young white Frenchmen in Extinction! T-shirts burnt the cathedral to cinders.
* * *
“We’ve no need for six bedrooms. In a way it’s fair.” Cyril’s stock social justice had grown lacklustre, and he pitched the platitudes in a mocking minor key.
“I’m sick of you telling me I have to learn to share, like some toddler,” Kay whispered hoarsely. “I hate having these people in our house.”
They were holed up in the loft, to which the homeowners had been banished by a good thirty visitors who had co-opted the rooms below.
“At least Simon tried to evict them,” Kay added.
“Bab, it’s hard for us to get our heads round it, but Simon is seventy-five. The display of loyalty was terribly touching, but banging on the door and making empty threats about ringing the police—what police?—simply put him at risk. Even most of the adults downstairs are less than half his age. He’s lucky they merely laughed at him. It could have been much worse.”
“It’s Roy who could organize our rescue if he wanted to,” Kay said.
Of their family members, Roy alone had flourished in the chaos, having got in on the ground floor of people-smuggling for the refugees who were better off. It was a lucrative trade. At seventy-two, he’d finally found his calling.
“True,” Cyril agreed heavily. “He has the underworld connections to mobilize a mob on command. But let’s be honest. Roy’s only interest in this property would be as a safe house for his customers.”
“Maybe we’re lucky that he hasn’t personally chucked us in the street, then,” Kay said. “At least Hayley seems to have learnt her lesson after that abortive performance art. She claims to have nostalgically returned to the ‘social distancing’ of the coronavirus outbreak, a fancy way of saying that she never leaves the house.”
Hayley had chosen the worst possible historical juncture to revive her arty ambitions from university. The piece she staged for the tent city in Regent’s Park was bound to end in tears. To illustrate “inequality,” she sat on a plush stool wolfing profiteroles as actors pretending to be refugees looked mournfully on. The actors were robbed, the profiteroles seized: far edgier theatre.
“Hey,” Kay said. “Did you see they took apart those lovely end tables and fed them to the log burner? And the kids used the charcoal afterwards to draw pictures on the sitting room wallpaper.”
“It was getting a bit faded,” Cyril said with a sigh. “Sod the wallpaper. The real problem is the plumbing. London’s sewage system is fragile enough, after all those wet-wipe and PPE fatbergs. But they don’t seem to realize what you can and can’t flush. I barely got the upstairs toilet working this afternoon, but when I sneaked down the ladder just now it was backed up with shite and overflowing again. Sorry, bab. Back to the bucket.”
“Got to feed the oldies, ya?” came from below. Having joined a contingent of local anarchists, the guests of their impromptu Airbnb hailed from multiple countries, so at least communicated with each other in English.
The retractable ladder rattled down, and their personal chef rose only the few steps required to fling the evening meal on the dusty floorboards. The lone main course was, as ever, a small mound of cornmeal mush, which might just have passed for polenta except it contained no butter, no parmesan cheese, and more fatally no salt. The plate was a piece of their wedding china: chipped and cracked but still attractive, with its cream centre, emerald border, and glint of silver on the rim.
“Don’t know why we bother with them,” came a female voice as the ladder was slammed closed again. “Food bitching to find. Waste of good ugali. Means time, Sarina get too thin.”
Once their overstaying houseguests had tromped away, Cyril whispered, “I’d enough time to get a partial charge on my phone today, because the others were mostly out—foraging, I suppose. But the electricity is bound to be cut off eventually. Our pensions no longer cover the British Gas bill, and the direct debit won’t have gone through for the last two months. They won’t be lenient forever.”
“Hurry up and check the BBC website, then!” Kay urged. “What’s the news?”
Cyril inhaled, scrolled, and sighed.
“What? How much worse can it be than yesterday?”
“They’ve rappelled up the Bank of England and bashed in the windows. It’s suspected they murdered the governor. In any case, it’s now another squat.”
The headline was of a piece. August university campuses from Cambridge to Bologna were occupied by needy arrivals, and what few courses were still offered were conducted patchily online; Hayley’s husband had long before been made redundant at UCL, as the last thing anyone had time for was linguistics. The British Library was covered with plywood, whilst the Booker was long gone, and even Sweden had dropped awarding Nobels for the last three years. The looted V&A was empty of artefacts, if full to the brim with exhibits of human desperation and ingenuity. Would that the paintings in the National Gallery had been stolen, but instead the canvases were hanging in shreds from attacks with penknives. Gaudi’s architecture in Barcelona had been vandalized into gaudy loose chippings. The stark blocks of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin had been systematically pulverized by sledgehammers, which the Germans tried to blame on neo-Nazis, but the rioting nihilists weren’t driven by any so constructive a purpose as the resurrection of the Third Reich.
“Goodness,” Kay said. “That building is a fortress. Was it Extinction!? Or the migrants?”
“Both. They’re operating in league now. And getting better organized. Funny, that: even anarchists gravitate towards order.”
“Maybe the Bank doesn’t even matter,” Kay said hopelessly. “Sterling is worthless anyway. You know”—she nodded at their supper—“this is grim enough without our kindly caretakers refusing to give us our own cutlery.”
“It’s cultural,” Cyril said, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I think by custom most of our downstairs neighbours eat with their left hands.”
They tried to maintain a semblance of civilization by sitting formally on either side of the plate, the sharp bones of their buttocks padded by quilts passed down from Kay’s grandmother. After dipping her hand in a bucket of their only once-clean water, she politely divided the mound into two portions with a forefinger, trying to give Cyril the greater amount; he was a man, and however nominally now the larger. The fare was hardly appetizing, but they were starving, and it took discipline not to fall upon the muck all at once. Instead, they always tried to draw out their mealtimes with reflective conversation, just as in the old days. Cyril lit their last candle stub, which created a cosy atmosphere, whilst helping to dim the heaps of bric-a-brac stashed under the eaves that might have “someday come in useful.”
“Back when we decided not to end it all on your eightieth,” Cyril began, “you told me that you ‘wanted to know what happened.’ You felt as if you were in the middle of all these stories, like climate change and the coronavirus and, heavens, I think at the time you even mentioned Brexit, of all things, and Donald Trump. You said that calling it quits in March of 2020 would be like returning a pile of unfinished novels to the library.”
“And you said,” she remembered, “that whenever we died, we’d always be in the middle of some unresolved historical plotline, so leaving loose ends dangling was part and parcel of mortality.”
“But I wanted to ask you something. The collapse of the pound, the soaring crime, the loss of all our savings. The flooding of New York City. The cricket-bat-wielding rampages through the British Museum. The descent of most of Europe into autocracy. Our own house occupied by strangers. Are you glad to have lived long enough to see all this? Or would you rather have opted out earlier and spared yourself? Looking back, how strong is your ‘narrative curiosity’ when the end of the book is this depressing?”
“Hmm,” Kay grunted. “I surprise myself a bit, because I’d have imagined that ‘narrative curiosity’ of mine was properly keen. But I’m not that curious. If I had it all to do over again, I think I’d accept the grand bargain you first proposed in 1991. Looking back, I think it must have been right around my eightieth birthday that everything started to go wrong. Maybe I’d rather have died in a state of innocence, or even delusion. Because I wish I’d never seen news photos of a Caravaggio sliced to ribbons and hanging from its frame. I wish I’d never seen the Houses of Parliament burnt to the ground. I wish I’d never seen the flowers in Kew Gardens trammelled and covered in human faeces. I’d love to turn back the clock to the twenty-ninth of March in 2020, toast our wonderful marriage with a glass of good cabernet, and knock back a handful of tablets to induce—well, whatever you call amnesia that allows you to forget the future. I’d have happily dozed off in our house, when it was still our house, nicely done up, where we’d conducted so many lovely evenings with dinners better than cornmeal caulking. I’d love to have left this world with no idea what awaits on the horizon, which, as I close my eyes for the last time, still looks bright.”
Cyril frowned, staring into the middle distance, which meant looking no further than the closest cobwebbed roof beam. “I may not feel the same way, and that surprises me as well. The last twenty years have been painful, but they’ve been interesting. If this descent into bedlam was going to happen anyway, then I’d prefer to have been around to see it. I don’t fancy delusion. I’ve always tried to look life square in the face.”
“Oh, you have not,” she said with a smile, leaning over to kiss his cheek.
“Of course, take the long view,” he said more cheerfully, “and we may be witnessing creative destruction. Something different and sometimes better always arises from the ashes, does it not? Look at the Renaissance.”
“True. But the Middle Ages lasted a thousand years.”
“Look at it this way, then. Mostly, we’ve led wonderful lives. We only got old enough to truly understand the Second World War once it was over, when we knew that the white hats had won. We lived through the Marshall Plan and the triumphant rise of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. We had long, useful careers. We raised three healthy children, at least one of whom turned out to be an agreeable human being. We availed ourselves of affordable labour-saving appliances. We got in on computers, and owned more than one, and then we were blessed with the internet, which however broadly misused is still a miracle. For four-fifths of our lives, technology, the alleviation of poverty, the powers of medical science—everything did nothing but improve. We’ve watched great films, read great books, and gone to great exhibitions. Before the last few years, we’ve walked the streets without fear. We’ve lived largely in a state of social order, which has made all our higher pleasures possible.
“But none of the angry young people ransacking the last of the West End theatres can say any of these things. They’ve experienced nothing but hardship and decline. They have no future, and they know it. The fundamentals of the Western world entered a fatal disequilibrium well before the rabble-rousing of Extinction! tearaways. Maybe those hooligans are just trying to get the inevitable demolition over with as fast as possible—”
“Sh-sh,” Kay said.
“Where you go?” came a female voice from the floor below.
“Got to get the plate from the oldies,” said the man who’d brought the mush. “We running low, ’cause they keep breaking. And got to empty they fucking bucket. Whoo-ee! Nothing that smell like oldie poo-poo.”
“Why you keep bothering with them shrivelly white folks?” the woman demanded. “We need the mealy-meal for the children. They stink, and they never stop running they mouths. Mumba-mumba-mumba come from the ceiling all day long.”
“Kokie, me soft lad, the queen’s spot on,” said a booming male voice in a strong Scouse accent. “Don’t make no sense, know what I’m saying? Scran’s proper tight, like. Might as well feed a boss tea to a pair of mangy dogs.”
“But they elders!” the minder protested. “They due respect!”
“Leave that guff back in the old country, mate,” the big male voice said. “Practical times call for practical measures.”
The catch on the hatch moved, and the loft ladder unfolded with a violent clatter. Kay clutched Cyril’s arm and their eyes met.
“What you gonna do, Dicky?” their minder pleaded from below. “What you gonna do?”
The man who emerged from the hatch was a massive, heavily muscled white fellow of about twenty-five they’d never seen before. He was carrying a machete. Had she downed that Seconal in 2020, it was one more image Kay would have spared herself. But at least the vision of her husband’s decapitated body didn’t burn on her retinas for more than a second or two.