23

The lull before the storm

Tired and emotional.

WHILST JUDY WAS ferreting out a truth that would shortly put both Rosalie and Max in mortal danger, Rosalie had joined her lover at the George V Hotel in Paris. She was in a funny mood.

‘I want a holiday,’ she told Max after the laminate had been duly stretched. ‘I want a holiday a lot.’

‘Cool,’ said Max, who was pretty much on holiday all the time anyway.

‘I’m tired and I need a rest,’ she said.

‘Anytime is party time for me, babe. Let’s raise hell.’

‘I said I need a rest and don’t call me babe,’ said Rosalie.

Had she been able to see into the future, Rosalie might have been even more anxious for a break. The gift of foresight would have shown her how much more limited her travel options were soon to become. She could not, however, see into the future. What is more, she had suddenly become very confused about her past.

‘I don’t know what I’ve been doing, Max. I look back and it just doesn’t seem to make any sense.’

‘Welcome to my world, girl,’ said Max, ‘I feel that way nearly every morning.’

But Rosalie was crying.

The toxic waste action had been something of a watershed. It was bad enough, having one’s first action as a Facilitator degenerate into a massive environmental disaster, without the FBI popping up in the middle of it all and accusing you of the most extraordinary and horrendous things. That, coupled with the revelations that she had heard at Jurgen Thor’s house, had so nearly thrown Rosalie that her idealism and determination seemed suddenly to have deserted her. She had been on active service for an unbroken five years and was entitled to some leave.

It was to be the lull before the storm.

Language barrier.

She and Max headed south-west and took a little room in a small village in Provence. Its sweet-smelling linen-covered quilt and little vase of flowers on the hand-painted dresser reminded both of them of the room in which they had first consummated their love. It made Rosalie feel a little lighter of heart. Max too felt good. A European tour with the person you love is something many a young American has dreamt of, and Max had always wanted to see the real France. He had found Paris a little snooty. He did not speak French and on a number of occasions, whilst desperate to get his bearings, he had approached a Parisian and made the apologetic appeal, ‘Excuse me, but do you speak English?’ only to be met by the infuriating riposte, ‘Yes, of course. Do you speak French?’

Nothing irritates the French cultural elite so much as the fact that, because of American economic hegemony after the Second World War, English became the dominant world language. The lingua franca, as it is called, as if to add insult to injury. It is a source of constant pain to the educated French that, but for a couple of unlucky results in the battles of the late eighteenth century, the United States would have been known as L’Etats-Unis, McDonald’s would be selling Grands Macs and Rock ’n’ Roll would be known as Rocher et Petit Pain. It is an understandable gripe for which Quebec and New Caledonia are no consolation at all.

Max had soon had enough of being patronized for being mono-lingual. His pride stung, he retreated to his hotel and holed himself up in his room, desperately cramming the French language. Virtual Reality had of course made learning the basics of a new language much easier than it had been in the past. It is universally acknowledged that the best way to learn to speak a foreign tongue is to plunge in amongst the natives. With a decent Linguafone VR helmet, it was possible to do just that in an extremely intense manner. Max spent days inside his helmet, visiting boulangeries, ordering café au lait and buying bus tickets over and over again.

A day in Provence.

By the time he and Rosalie headed south, Max was very proud of his new skills and insisted on employing them to conduct all negotiations.

‘Vous avez une chambre pour la nuit, avec une salle de bain?’ he said, giving it plenty of Gallic intonation and pantomimic hand motion. All to no avail, as it happened. Max was a very good actor, but even he could not mime a bedroom with en suite bathroom. He was met with a blank stare.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ the house agent said in a plummy English voice, ‘I’m afraid I don’t speak French.’

Rather disappointed, Max was forced to negotiate for their pretty little room in English.

Having settled in, and then settled in again in a different position, they set off to explore the village. It was not as much fun as they had hoped, confined as they were to hot dusty little BioTubes. Provence, having long since given up any pretence at agriculture in order to concentrate on tourism, was not granted the convenience of orbital sun-screening. Since this meant that strolling outside was as hot and stuffy as staying inside, Rosalie suggested they drop in somewhere for a drink. This was an idea which Max never turned down and they made for a little cockney-style pub called The Dog and Duck.

‘Deux verres de vin rouge, s’il vous plaît,’ Max said firmly. Only to be met again with a non-comprehending look.

‘Nobody speaks French here, Max,’ Rosalie explained. ‘This is Provence. The whole area became completely English-speaking over fifty years ago. They even drive on the left.’ She bought a couple of pints of bitter and they sat together, alone in the smoky snug.

Decent proposal.

Max was looking rather uncomfortable, a bit sheepish. There was something on his mind.

‘What’s up, Max?’ Rosalie enquired.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, hey, that’s not true, it’s definitely a vibe, you know, if you think these things are important, which I think I do, it’s a vibe … I was just wondering if, well, basically, if you would marry me?’

Rosalie was caught rather off her guard. Her eyes stared and her face coloured to a deep blush. Green does not, on the whole, go with red, except maybe on apples and in this case on Rosalie, at least as far as Max was concerned. Staring into her eyes, Max felt that he had never seen anyone or anything look lovelier. Feeling rather that his proposal had done little or nothing to reflect the heart-stopping beauty of its object, Max dropped to one knee and tried again.

‘Rosalie, I love you. I would lay down my life for you in a heartbeat. Your eyes are like emeralds and your skin, when you aren’t blushing the way you happen to be now, is like ivory … with freckles. You care about stuff and your voice is smooth as Irish cream or something, and you can fight and handle a gun and I love you and you’ve got to marry me.’ Max paused, then added with a flourish, ‘Je t’aime.’

‘Lord Almighty, Max,’ said Rosalie, much taken aback. ‘That’s something to throw at a girl … You’ll have to give me time to think about it.’

‘Of course, of course. I understand.’

‘I’ve thought about it. All right I’ll marry you.’

That evening, over a celebration meal of traditional Provençal roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by treacle pudding and custard, they discussed their wedding plans.

‘Only close friends,’ said Max firmly. ‘This is going to be a real wedding, not some Hollywood stunt. We charter only one Jumbo sub-orbital. That’s it, the limit, kapeesh? Two hundred and fifty guests from America, max. It’ll mean offending some people very dear to me, but I ain’t marrying them, am I? And no press! Just those we invite. Two magazines, two tabloids and any quality broadsheet that wants the story, obviously. Now, who do you want to do your dress? I think it would be a nice move if we used a Dublin designer.’

‘Max,’ said Rosalie, ‘I’m a criminal wanted in Europe and America. If we get married it will have to be in total secrecy. We can’t have any press, we can’t bring anybody over from America.’

‘No one?’ Max asked, slightly stunned.

‘No one, I’m afraid, unless you want to spend your wedding night visiting me in jail.’

‘OK, so no one it is. Just my agent and my publicist then. Gee, that’s weird.’

‘No one, Max, not even your agent and your publicist. In fact, especially not them.’

Max chewed a ruminative mouthful of irradiated beef. The meat had been expertly reflavoured using only the finest chemicals and yet he scarcely tasted it. He was trying to get his head around the concept of doing something as big as getting married without his agent or his publicist. Who would handle the press? The fans? The cops? His mother? Then it dawned on him that none of these people would be there.

‘You actually want me to get married alone, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Well, not entirely. I need to be there.’

‘Is it legal if the press don’t witness it? I mean, I kind of thought they had to be there.’

Rosalie gave Max’s hand an encouraging squeeze.

‘It’ll be all right, Max. No need to be nervous. People do things that haven’t been arranged by their agents and publicists all the time. In fact, most people don’t even have agents and publicists.’

Max was vaguely aware that this was the case, but after eight years as a super-celebrity he found it rather difficult to imagine. Eventually though, he accepted Rosalie’s argument.

‘OK, there’s a church in the square, let’s go knock up the padre.’

‘Are you out of your mind, Max? This is Provence!’

‘So?’

‘Every church within twenty miles of here is Church of England! Sure, I’d rather get hitched in a witches’ coven.’

Nocturnal nuptials.

They left the little English carvery at about ten and headed north in their hire car. Rosalie drove, Max having had most of both of the bottles of wine they had ordered.

‘It isn’t always going to be me who drives, OK?’ she said. ‘I like a drink too, you know.’

‘Fine, sometimes we’ll take a taxi.’

After passing through several villages that were quite nice, but only quite, they came upon the perfect church in a little village called Donzère, about eight miles south of Montélimar. Despite it being nearly midnight (country time) they knocked up the priest.

‘Father. We want to get married and we’d like to do it now if that’s all right with you,’ Rosalie said in passable schoolgirl French.

‘Well, it is not,’ the priest replied in English. ‘Are you mad, coming here at this hour, I’ve a good mind to—’

‘Father,’ Rosalie interrupted him, ‘I’m a wanted terrorist and I can’t get married in the normal way. Now I’ve got a gun, and my fiancé here has suitcases full of money. Either one of these things is going to persuade you to marry us right now. Which is it to be?’

‘There’s nothing in the world wakes a man up like the sight of young love,’ said the priest. ‘How much are you prepared to pay?’

The deal done, the priest hastily put on his robes and led the expectant couple through the churchyard to his darkened church.

‘You know it won’t be a legal marriage, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Without the proper papers it can only be symbolic.’

‘That’s all we care about,’ Rosalie replied.

And so the priest spoke the marriage service in the little church, lit only by a few candles. Neither Rosalie nor Max were particularly religious people, but where Rosalie came from you got married in a church and that was the end of it. She could not imagine it any other way. Max sensibly neglected to mention his two divorces.

The road to Damascus.

Despite the fact that Rosalie was still very much wanted by the FBI, they decided to return to the USA. A new identity was a comparatively easy thing to obtain if you had Max’s money and Rosalie’s contacts and she entered the country without trouble.

Rosalie had decided to resign her commission in Mother Earth. Plastic Tolstoy could pay somebody else to alert the world to the need to buy more Claustrospheres. She was fed up with it. She had been fighting almost continually for five and a half years and had achieved nothing. You couldn’t breathe the air any more, you couldn’t drink the water, walk in the sunshine or enjoy the rain on your face, and Rosalie had no energy left to be bothered about it.

She had made the decision whilst flying the sub-orbital to LA with Max. Having got over the excitement that her first-class seat actually had an arm-rest on both sides, she had tuned into the news channel. She had been looking for an update on the situation in Belgium, but discovered to her astonishment that the disaster had already been dropped from the bulletins. Three days down the track and the poisoning of an entire country was old news.

Rosalie was not on the road to Damascus, she was on a flight to LA, but at that moment she saw the truth as clearly as the apostle Paul had, on his journey.

People had got used to the planet dying.

They didn’t care any more, it had been lingering on for too long. The Earth was like some aged and slightly disgusting relative that just got sicker and sicker and yet refused to die. Requiring more and more attention, growing bigger tumours, bursting nastier sores and soiling its sheets ever more often. An embarrassment and an inconvenience, a constant reminder of family guilt. It was almost as if, now that people had their Claustrospheres, they wanted the world to die. To get it over with. Everyone had lived with the imminence of planet death for so long that they really could not get excited about it any more.

A young man was coming down the corridor from the toilets. He was wearing the famous Claustrophobe sweatshirt, slightly sanitized for general display. A picture of a slimy, dead Earth and the legend ‘Well, f*** that then’ embossed beneath it.

Rosalie looked at the shirt, unconsciously quoting the slogan.

‘Well, fuck that then,’ she said to herself.

Except, in fact, she said it to at least the ten people closest to her. Rosalie was wearing earphones in order to hear the news. She had forgotten, as so many people do, that you lose control of the volume of your voice when wearing earphones. The stewardess approached and leant across to Max.

‘Would you mind asking your companion to moderate her language, please, sir. There are children on board.’

The lull before the storm.

Few people are immune to the seduction of luxury and Rosalie was under no illusions about her own delight in a bit of pampering. She did rather surprise even herself, however, when she moved into a house that had a CIaustrosphere attached to it. A Claustrosphere, what’s more, that was the size of four or five tennis courts.

‘Do you like it?’ Max had asked with genuine pride. ‘It has a pool, you know.’

‘Max, I’ve spent five years blowing these things up.’

‘Well, don’t blow this one up or I’ll divorce you. It has state-of-the-art leisure facilities and its fish cycle includes caviar. Come on, ba … I mean, uhm … darling, we’re on honeymoon.’

Max could see that Rosalie was torn; it was all very well leaving Mother Earth, but frolicking in a Claustrosphere was a big leap.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘husbands and wives are supposed to share each other’s interests, right? Well, I’ve tried to get involved in your whole green thing, haven’t I? Now you have to get into my stuff.’

‘Which is?’

‘Partying, girl. You know it makes sense.’

And suddenly she did. A huge weight seemed to lift from Rosalie’s shoulders. It dawned on her that if she wanted to pack it all in for a while and have a good time, then she could. It was up to her.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Bugger it, it isn’t my fault the bloody Earth’s knackered. I didn’t do it. I’m on holiday.’

And to her astonishment, on the very first morning that she moved in with Max, Rosalie found herself lying by the Claustrosphere pool, wearing a bikini and sunbathing, something it had been impossible to do outside for over thirty years. Max suggested that since they were married and entirely alone in a hermetically sealed private world, Rosalie might like to dispense with the swimming costume.

‘Maybe in a while,’ Rosalie said. She was readjusting fast, but there were limits. Being inside a Claustrosphere was one thing, wandering around it starkers was another.

Slowly though, throughout that first day she relaxed. They both did, it was a honeymoon. They swam, they played tennis in the gamesuits, they got a little drunk and they made love in the soft lush grass.

‘I suppose this is what life must have been like in the real world, before it all got spoilt,’ Rosalie said as she lay in the quiet meadow, her hair mingling with the daisies and buttercups.

‘If you were an outrageously overpaid movie star, yes. I believe it was tougher for the little guys,’ Max replied.

They did not return to the house that night, but stayed where they were, outdoors but indoors, naked in a tiny meadow as the light cycle turned to velvet darkness and the fireflies in the forest area began to glow.

There was even dew in the morning when they awoke, a little chilly, at around five a.m. and Max brought cushions and blankets from the living area. They made love again and then watched the false dawn slowly turning their little private world from darkness to cold grey. Rosalie felt a fine drizzle on her face.

‘It’s … it’s raining,’ she said, astonished.

‘It does sometimes,’ said Max. ‘You never know when till it happens. Just like the real thing, huh? The precipitation cycle is regulated according to seasons, but apart from that it’s random. What do you think?’

‘It’s beautiful, Max. I had no idea these things could be so beautiful.’

Of course Rosalie knew that not all Claustrospheres were as luxurious as Max’s. The vast dormitory-style municipal complexes of the English Home Counties, for instance, or those in Long Island and New Jersey or underneath the Mediterranean Sea could not boast quite such opulence, but they too had tennis courts and swimming pools, albeit public ones. They too were, in their way, beautiful.

‘But it is obscene, you know that, don’t you?’ Rosalie said at last, trying to remember how much she hated the very idea of Claustrospheres.

‘Yeah, yeah, sure, we all know that, but what can I tell you? You have to allow yourself some time off from yourself, you have to get out of your own way.’ And with that, he gathered Rosalie up in his arms, carried her to the pool and jumped in, kissing her all the while.

To start the day with a dip in your own pool is a splendid thing, but to do so in the knowledge that you have nothing whatsoever to do after breakfast is doubly so. Rosalie shrieked with joy. She had not felt so light-hearted since she had been a girl.

All that day and the next, and the next until they lost count, Rosalie and Max swam and played and made love, never once leaving the Claustrosphere This was the beginning of their lives together and they did not want the beginning to end. Each afternoon Max worked out in his little gymnasium and watched videos, whilst Rosalie spent lazy hours by the pool with the ElectroBook. The ElectroBook was an extraordinary invention and a joy to behold. It placed all the writings of the world in the palm of your hand. Of course, it had long been possible to condense all literature on to a disc or two and read it on a screen, but people had never really taken to this method of reading, because curling up with a laptop computer was just not as nice as it was with a book. The ElectroBook solved this problem of sensual aesthetics, for it was a real leatherbound book with hundreds of pages made not of paper, but of wafer-thin, flexible, fibre optically-fed screens. On to these screens, which could be folded, bent, screwed up and read upside down in a hammock, would appear anything that had ever been written at the simple touch of an index.

One day, Rosalie and Max were lying in the meadow together. She was on her back, while Max lay with his head resting on her stomach. She had put aside her ElectroBook, upon which she had been reading David Copperfield, and was staring up at the great geodesic dome above her. How splendid it looked, with its soft light and the delicate mists that floated up towards the roof. Rosalie was suffused with a wonderful feeling of well-being. All her life she had worried about the world, and now here she was in a perfect one. She had achieved that which she had always most desired: she was living in a perfect world. Outside its near-impregnable walls was the rest of the universe, filled as it was with other planets, Mars, Neptune … Earth. Planets that were nothing to do with her. Why should she worry any more about the dying Earth than she did about the frozen corpse that was Mars? Neither planet was her world. She had a Garden of Eden all of her own.

She found herself half-quoting some Shakespeare she had heard long ago. ‘“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden …” ’

‘Richard the Second,’ said Max, who had done a lot of acting classes.

‘I thought it was an old Claustrosphere advert,’ said Rosalie.

‘That too. Good choice, don’t you think? It certainly sums up this place.’

There was a long silence, broken only by the soft buzzing of the bees, special bees that could make honey out of old toenail clippings, lived for fifteen years and had no sting.

Finally Rosalie spoke again.

‘Max. Let’s close it up.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean. Let’s shut the BioLock.’

‘It is shut, darling. The cycles don’t work unless it’s sealed.’

‘No, let’s shut it properly. Put it on the time-safe.’

‘You mean … with us on the inside, don’t you?’

Rosalie did not reply, instead she took Max in her arms and kissed him. It was a long kiss, passionate and committed, but with also just a hint of sadness, perhaps even despair.

Time-safe.

All Claustrospheres were equipped with a time-safe lock. This was because people feared the constancy of their resolve. Once faced with a lifetime inside a small shelter, they suspected that their will might crack after a while. That they might be tempted to ignore the numerous indicators and gauges with which their shelters were equipped, and open the door to have a look outside to see if things were really as bad as they were being told. If they did this while the outside environment remained poisonous, then those poisons would enter the ’Sphere and hopelessly compromise the eco-system within, killing everybody inside. It had therefore been decided that when the Rat Run finally came, the authorities would issue an estimate as to when the environment might be safe enough again for people to emerge. It might be one year, it might be a hundred. Whatever it was, the occupants of a Claustrosphere would set their timer for that duration. Once set, the BioLock would not open under any circumstances until the time had elapsed. This system was thought particularly necessary in the case of the big community BioShelters. People recognized that it would only take one crazy lunatic to crack up and open the door, and they preferred the idea of voluntary imprisonment to mass poisoning.

Adam and Eve.

Rosalie released Max from the tension of her embrace. He was a little stunned.

‘You want us to lock ourselves in?’

‘Sure, why not? People will be forced to pretty soon anyway, if not this year, maybe the next. I was an environmental activist, I know how bad things are.’ Rosalie spoke quickly, as if fearful that having made her decision, she might, on reflection, change her mind. ‘Let’s do it now, forget them all. There’s only us, anyway. This is our world. Let’s lock the universe out.’

Max thought about it for a while.

‘How long would you want to set it for?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, ten, maybe fifteen years. Just till our baby’s grown. We can reassess the situation on the monitors then.’

‘Our baby?’

‘That’s right. Our baby.’

‘I didn’t know we were going to have a baby.’

‘Well, we are, and I want it to live in a beautiful world.’

Max looked at Rosalie and he smiled, a great happy smile. It was dusk in the Claustrosphere but that smile lit up Rosalie’s whole universe.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

Out of paradise.

They left the Claustrosphere for the first time since their honeymoon had begun. Max had one or two things which he wanted to put in order and Rosalie had to ring her grandparents. She knew they would be saddened at the collapse of her principles but she did not care. They were in the past, her baby was the future. She had the chance to give her baby a childhood in paradise and she was going to take it.

They went out through the BioLock and up to the house. After weeks inside the pristine environment of the Claustrosphere it seemed to Max and Rosalie as if the world was already dead. The air stank and the filtered sunlight was weak and watery.

Max made a few calls. Cancelling his subscription to Life magazine. Putting all his money into high-yield longterm accounts and informing his astonished agent that he was retiring. Soon they were ready. Rosalie had only to make her call, and they could go back into their little private paradise and lock the Earth out behind them.

Then the front doorbell rang.

‘Leave it,’ said Rosalie. ‘We don’t live in this world any more.’

‘Oh, come on, we might as well see who it is,’ said Max, and before Rosalie could stop him he had flipped on the video camera that covered his front door.

Judy was standing outside.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Rosalie gasped. ‘It’s that little bastard from the FBI.’

‘Bad call,’ said Max.

‘Max.’ There was panic in Rosalie’s voice. ‘Don’t answer the door, let’s go, now, into the Claustrosphere, leave him. We were going to go, let’s go.’

Max spoke gently. For the first time in their relationship it was he who would have to be the sensible and realistic one.

‘Rosalie, listen, you’ve got yourself thinking about that Claustrosphere as if it was a whole other world—’

‘It is,’ said Rosalie.

The bell rang again.

‘It isn’t, Rosalie, it’s a Claustrosphere. A building on a piece of real estate which exists in the real world. Now that man is an FBI agent, an agent who’s already tried to arrest you once. The chances are he’s come to do it properly this time. If we disappear, believe me the first thing they’ll do is blast open the BioLock on the Claustrosphere. What you have to do is hide while I talk to him. Maybe I can get him to go away. Then we can plan our next move.’

Suddenly Rosalie saw her dream idyll fading like the dream it was. Desperately she tried to save it.

‘Let’s kill him,’ she said.

Max looked at Rosalie, a little shocked.

‘Now I hope you said that because you’re hormonally imbalanced, due to being pregnant,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from the fact that icing people is kind of dubious in a moral sense. Practically, it would be a no-win call. If you kill FBI agents, they send more, lots more. It’s a rule they have. Now you get behind the two-way mirror, and I’ll let the guy in.’

‘Two-way mirror?’ said Rosalie, returning to the real world with a bump.

‘Yeah … uhm … yeah, the guy who had the house before me was a porn king,’ said Max, and, pushing Rosalie into a recess in the wall behind a mirror, he buzzed open the door and let Judy in.

‘Come on up!’ he called, and Judy nervously climbed the stairs.

‘I nearly went off home,’ Judy said, arriving in the lounge area.

‘Yeah, I was out the back in the Claustrosphere. Nice to see you again, man, what’s happening?’ Max replied.

‘Ms Connolly not with you?’ Judy enquired. ‘The way you two seemed to be getting on in Ireland, I rather thought she might be.’

‘No, she ain’t here.’

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ said Judy. ‘It’s you I need to speak to.’

‘Me?’ replied Max, full of suspicion. ‘What do you want with me, man?’

‘I need your help to catch a ruthless, callous, immoral viper, a man with not a single shred of compassion or decency in his body, a man who cares nothing for anything or anybody but himself.’

‘Hey, man, this is Hollywood,’ said Max. ‘I know a lot of guys like that, you’ll have to be more specific.’