Cloud Cuckoo Land Read online

  The crowd were subdued, they were swaddled into a kind of civilian uniform, layers and layers of dulled-down camouflage. They went about their business, but they weren’t shopping in the usual family groups. Everyone seemed to be going their own way, looking out for themselves.

  There was a constant sensation of angst in the air, of rush hour, and Leonard felt sick in his stomach. They passed two emptied out and beaten up chocolate machines, Lena looked inside anyway.

  As they turned and walked towards the café, Leonard looked down at his feet. A water main must have burst because the pavement was flooded and the slabs were lifting, almost floating away.

  ‘Don’t bite your lip, Lena, it makes you look vulnerable.’

  Leonard grabbed her hand, pulled her through the crowd and into the café. The place was decorated inside and out with white tiles and green grout, it was like graph paper, like sitting inside an exercise book. There were some arches against the walls, though, and inside the arches, naïve murals of the sacking of Rome. The tables and chairs were that bright yellow kind of pine, and the floor was a dark, stain-resistant plastic. Lena sat in the window and Leonard went to the counter. There was no one around, so he called out.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oi oi, keep the noise down!’

  It was a customer, an old guy sat at a corner table, huddled around his mug.

  ‘There’s nobody here, you idiot, and all they’ve got is soup, so help yourself to soup.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve got?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about what I’ve got, you just get some soup down you and be thankful for the bloody small mercy of it.’

  Leonard looked at the empty crisp boxes and up at the fluorescent lists of mixed-grill breakfasts. His stomach groaned. He took a couple of upside-down mugs off the counter and filled them from a hot chrome barrel. He carried them over to Lena. It was really just heated water, it was so diluted that only a faint trace of salted stock registered. Lena looked up at Leonard and made a sort of ‘drink it anyway’ face. So they did.

  Leonard rubbed a patch of condensation off the window and looked out. The lorry was easy enough to pick out, with its sweatshirt logo painted huge along the side. They were OK those two, Paul and Danny boy; semi-skilled, salt of the earth, fly-by-nights. They were common-sense blokes; they reminded Leonard of dependable infantrymen, those lower ranks who were often a lot more capable than their commanding officers. They were throwing ropes across the smoking wreck of the car and tying them onto the crash bars at the front of the lorry.

  ‘Leonard?’

  He looked around at Lena. She’d really not said much all day, but he knew she’d been watching and listening, sifting through all the new information.

  ‘What happens if everybody dies?’

  Leonard shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If everybody dies! You know.’

  ‘Well, then the whole bloody world will have been one great big waste of time. Look, don’t lose heart, we’ll make it up to the survival pods, we’ve got a bloody good chance of getting through all this.’

  He realised he was a long way from convincing her.

  Lena smiled.

  ‘Can we go for a walk?’

  He looked through the window at the lads; they were still trying to drag the wreck off the road with the ropes, but they kept on slipping and snapping.

  ‘Yeah OK, let’s get some air. Paul and Danny’ll be a while yet.’

  They stepped out of the cafe and took a back alley away from the market. They climbed up past a Norman church, through some budding oak trees, up to a flat plateau above the town. The landscape sloped away to the west. The road Paul and Danny wanted to take zigzagged toward a flat horizon. Each side of the road there were fires, campfires, tents and makeshift shelters, stretching away into the distance. It was like a view of a medieval siege plain, a grey sky with black smoke from fires trailing off at forty-five degrees.

  Lena had moved off downhill. When Leonard caught up with her, she was standing at the edge of a shallow film of water, which was rising out of the ground, then flooding down-slope from a burst pipe.

  A man stood in the middle of the road, holding a baby in his arms. He was just standing there with the water rushing over his shoes.

  They stepped around the flood and turned back towards the market. They passed mounds of black rubbish bags that were overfilled and spilling across the streets. A few cars cruised by slowly, with spare petrol cans lashed to their boot lids.

  ‘Leonard!’

  Lena’s voice was fearful. A group of kids had ringed her, a dozen or so young kids, all under twelve. The colour had been washed out of their clothes and their cheeks were grey and blood drained. Their heads were tilted down because they wanted to hide their smiles. One kid lifted his head and the others listened, his voice was menacing.

  ‘In your lorry. Where you going that’s better than here?’

  Leonard let Lena answer because if he spoke for her, that would be the first trigger.

  ‘I said, where you going?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t matter any more, does it?’

  Leonard looked into their eyes as one by one the heads lifted. They had that compressed life experience of refugees. It was clear that they didn’t give a fuck for what they did now, not after all they’d witnessed, not after all they’d learned from the adults. They moved closer to Lena and one of the girls got hold of her hair.

  ‘I smell a virgin, Jinksy, we can get a rush for that!’

  ‘Fuckin’ yeah, trade her in no prob’. She’s got to be worth something to someone, eh?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  ‘What?’

  One of the kids took hold of Lena’s ear. He ran his hand over her top lip.

  ‘Fucking hell, Jinks, I reckon we’ve hit the jackpot here. She’s chin-tagged!’

  Jinksy looked across at Leonard because he had taken a step in their direction.

  ‘She’s ours now, wanker.’

  The air exploded above their heads. Leonard looked up to see Paul waving and running towards them, aiming the shotgun before firing again. They let go of Lena and scattered back into the side streets. Paul was red-faced and breathing heavily, his hands were black with grease and his eyes were narrowed, searching for stragglers.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, come on, we’ve cleared the road! You shouldn’t have left the bloody café! Let’s get back to the truck!’

  He turned and started running. Leonard grabbed Lena’s hand and they ran after him.

  ◊

  Danny was driving and Paul was asleep in the overhead bunk. Leonard and Lena were sitting in the double bench seats, staring at the road ahead. It was engaging cinema and there was only the one simple storyline; they were the good guys and they were headed somewhere safe, for now that was all. The bends swept by and the landscape started to flatten out, the cloud cover was breaking up and the sky was brightening. Lena was squinting in the sunlight; she was too low in the seat to get any benefit from the green-tinted shading at the top of the windscreen. When she looked up at Danny and Leonard, though, their eyes were shaded and their skin coloured the same filtered green. Nobody had said anything for a while, so she did.

  ‘Where are we, Danny?’

  ‘We’re running parallel to the coastline which is a few miles to the east. It’s not far now.’

  Lena was excited; she rubbed her eyes and squinted harder. She felt good in the middle, sitting in between them, she felt buffered and she didn’t mind if they never got where they were going.

  She turned and asked Danny a question.

  ‘Do you think we’ll all be killed, I mean by the Ice Moon?’

  Danny’s foot came off the accelerator a bit while he thought about that one.

  ‘Buggered if I know, it’s all down to luck now, isn’t it? God knows what’s gonna kick off when that big bastard comes flying out of the sky. They think it’s going to pulverise China now, don
’t they? The facts are nasty, think about it - the asteroid will hit us at something like twenty thousand miles an hour! It’s a flying mountain. I’m not trying to alarm you, Lena, but we are facing a mass extinction event!’

  Leonard wound down the window and warm, fresh air blew into the cab. He looked over the top of Lena’s head and said, ‘Not trying to alarm you?’

  Danny shrugged an apology.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I mean that’s what I’ve heard.’

  Leonard drank from a bottle of water and offered it to Lena.

  ‘Listen, Lena, look at it this way. The asteroid is just an unfortunate acceleration.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Of what was going to happen anyway.’

  ‘He means pollution and wars and stuff?’

  ‘I suppose I mean the general, all-round, blind stupidity the human race specialises in. We were always heading for a fall.’

  She looked like an adult when she nodded that she understood.

  ‘Can we stop? I need the toilet.’

  ‘I’ll pull off the road a minute, if you like.’

  The lorry stopped and Leonard stepped down into a different landscape. These were flatlands and the water table felt close, it was just below and sometimes broke the surface. Tall reed-beds stretched out on each side of the road, pale near the ground and deep green at the tip, swaying in the wind, in unison.

  Danny lifted his arms above his head and stretched out his spine. He took a couple of steps, kicked a stone off the tarmac and pointed.

  ‘Coastline’s about ten miles that way. It’s reeds, grasses and sedge from here on in. Nice, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m going to take a leak too, Danny.’

  ‘Don’t go far and mind your step, it’s waterlogged.’

  Leonard and Lena stepped off the road and walked into the reeds, she scurried off to the left and he went in a few metres further. He could hear hammering in the distance, a club hammer with a steady rhythm. As he listened, he started to anticipate the next blows and it was comforting for a while to be in synch, until the blows stopped.

  When Leonard zipped up and stood still for a few minutes, the swaying reeds were taller than he was. He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. He’d been feeling nauseous for the past fifty miles; too much motion, and towards what? His stomach ached; it was restless and filled with excess digestive acids. He was probably just scared now. Like everybody else, the reality was beginning to bite, the weeks were counting down. Leonard was not sure that he had the time or the courage to do what he had planned. Maybe he was just kidding himself, following an unconscious urge, a fairytale myth of being the hero who saved the day.

  Lena came back out of the reeds with wet shoes. She looked across at the truck and saw that scruffy-haired Paul and yawning Danny were speaking to two other men who were carrying guns. A black dog at their feet started to bark in her direction and she didn’t know what to do.

  Danny piped up.

  ‘It’s alright, come on over.’

  Leonard waved at Lena and she ran across to him before they left the reeds and walked to the lorry.

  The dog barked until it was told to shut up. It was a black, barrel-chested Labrador.

  Paul was trying hard to lick-spittle his hair down, he introduced Ben and Trevor.

  ‘This is Ben and this is Trevor, they’re patrolling the area.’

  They said the hellos and Leonard felt reassured, it was a brief and amicable exchange. Trevor was a big and heavy man, cheerful with it. Ben didn’t say much, but he looked shrewd enough. They nodded a lot and wanted to know the story, then they headed off pretty happily into the reeds with their shotguns broken over their shoulders and the dog following.

  Paul drove the last few miles, he pointed out their destination as he turned off the road onto a gravel drive. He kept the engine in first gear for the steep climb up to a group of mock-Tudor barns scattered around a big old house.

  ‘It’s not exactly a mountain, I know, but here we are something like a hundred metres above sea level, it’s the highest ground for miles around. The original house was built on an outcrop of purplish granite, it was originally the site of a Danish fort.’

  ‘Vikings!’

  ‘Yeah, they put their settlement right here, funny how the same logic holds as true for us today as it did a thousand years ago. They built in wood, though obviously that didn’t last. The archaeology lot from the university had the place dug up a few years back, they found all sorts of stuff.’

  The outbuildings, like the main house, were wood framed. The blackened timbers showed through the rendered exterior of the walls. The plasterwork in between the timbers was tea brown, weathered and faded, with small, leaded windows and a steep roof. It was like arriving in a medieval hamlet, with the buildings wrapped around a straggling courtyard.

  There were some modernisations though, some additions to the main house: a red brick extension, with a larger entrance door, Roman pillars each side and grimacing lion statues guarding the last few steps up to the house.

  Leonard looked off to his left, he could see through to the ground behind the house, to a row of prefab’ houses and a tennis court. Next to the tennis court were something like thirty or more brightly coloured luxury cars, a collection of all the cars that used to be sought after. Daimlers and Range Rovers, BMWs, Volvos, Audis; they were all shunt-parked into a rough circle. They were ditched really into a General Custer’s last stand, left to rot where they’d ran out of petrol. The men and women who’d arrived in those cars appeared as soon as Paul hit the horn and switched the engine off.

  Lena felt a bit nervous as she stepped down from the lorry, she didn’t like to be the centre of attention. And some of the people looked a bit weird, there were lots of beards. They were nearly all long haired, even the men who were bald on top let their hair at the back and sides straggle down to lion-heart length. Leonard felt like they’d arrived on some radical university campus. When they started saying hello though, they were warm and smiling people, men with square shoulders and quick eyes. The women made a fuss too, they gave Lena and Leonard perfectly weighted kisses.

  They must have had other things to do because after ten minutes or so they wandered off in different directions and eventually only Paul was left to show them into the house.

  The hallway was dark and quiet, their footsteps fell onto thick carpet. There were portrait paintings hanging each side, dark backgrounds and pink faces, oil paintings, old ones.

  They could hear music coming from a room further into the house. Paul led them through connecting rooms which were filled with antique furniture, Louis fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; not laid out for living but more for storage, all jumbled together in job lots.

  The music was coming from the other side of the door just ahead, Paul turned to Leonard and shook his hand.

  ‘I’ll leave you to make your own introductions.’

  He rubbed the top of Lena’s head and headed off into another part of the house.

  Leonard knocked but there was no answer.

  ‘Whoever’s in there won’t be able to hear you knocking, the music’s too loud.’

  ‘I know that, Lena.’

  Leonard twisted the handle and gave the door a shove. It swung open and across the room a big, bald man was standing in front of a loud speaker. He was standing very close to a big, rosewood Goodman, his lips were up against the pattern of concave, soot black hollows. It was like he was whispering in there or waiting for a kiss. He’d removed the mesh frame that is usually stretched over the front and he had his fingers resting inside, against the base and treble cones. He was moving his head in time to the music, flugelhorn music.

  Leonard bent down and spoke into Lena’s ear.

  ‘I know this, it’s that elephant music, psychic elephant music.’

  The man started to dance. To begin with, it was mostly with his head, but then with his neck and shoulders. When the music reached a series of rising crescendo
s, his whole body started to spin dervish-like around the room. He was going too fast for his eyes to register that he had company. His arms lifted like a centrifuge and he spun, filling his fingers with blood, spilling his drink, dropping his glass. It was a laughable spectacle, but joyful, enviable even. He looked like a fool. A glad and quite glorious fool at the peak of his foolishness.

  The track finished and the man steadied himself on the back of an armchair. He waited for his world to stop spinning, for the inertia to trail off so that he could walk across the room. He knew Lena and Leonard were there because he lifted his hand and said breathlessly, ‘Sorry you had to see that. Be right with you, just one minute.’

  So he crossed to them and they met on the sky-blue rug in the middle of the music room. This was Barry, and Barry had a bald, tanned head with six, deep and dry creases in his forehead. He wore a white shirt and dark tie, the whiter shape of a ‘t’ shirt showing beneath. He looked like some sort of union boss, all beer-bellied up and ready to take the rule book in his right hand. A kind face though, well meaning and well rounded.

  ‘So I bet you two could use a drink then, eh?’

  Leonard shook Barry’s hand and presented Lena.

  ‘What’ll you have then, ladies first.’

  ‘Beer please.’

  ‘Right you are, good choice.’

  Leonard thought about making a fuss, but he suspected that sometimes you had to let the lesson be learned. Barry came back with a bottle and gave it to her.

  ‘And you, Leonard?’

  ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’

  ‘OK but I should warn you, I always have plenty of nutmeg in my toddies.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I got the idea from reading about Nostradamus, he used to take a lot of the stuff because it’s supposed to aid second sight!’

  ‘Ah, well I’m not so sure I want to see anymore than I’ve seen just lately. I think I’d rather not know what the future holds.’