A Lovely Way to Burn

Twenty-Three

In the hours they had spent in bed, it had grown obvious what was wrong with the view from Iqbal’s apartment. There were fewer street lights than there should have been, and whole districts of the city were now sunk in darkness.

Stevie stood at the window, trying to work out which neighbourhoods were illuminated, but it was like trying to map an unfamiliar galaxy and she gave up. Iqbal was still in bed, sprawled beneath the duvet, sleeping like the dead.

She had lain on her side watching the gentle rise and fall of his breaths, and been surprised by two contradictory emotions: a stab of guilt at being unfaithful to Simon, and an urge to close her eyes, give in and stay with Iqbal. It would be the sensible thing to do. Sit tight, tune into the TV and radio and wait until things worked themselves out. But it would be a kind of death too.

Stevie padded downstairs in her bare feet and got dressed. She copied Simon’s files on to the memory stick Iqbal had given her and then printed out two copies of each. It might only be a matter of time before the electricity failed here too, or the Internet went down. She left one of the bundles of printouts on Iqbal’s desk and tried to compose a note, but there was too much and too little to say. In the end she scribbled her mobile number on a scrap of paper, added her name and a kiss: Stevie X. It would have to do. She hesitated over Simon’s laptop, wondering if she should take it with her, but decided to leave it where it was. It was safer at Iqbal’s, one computer hidden amongst many, the same way that Simon’s murder would have been one small death amongst thousands, were it not for the letter he had left her.

Stevie had her hand on the front door when she suddenly turned back, booted the computer up again and printed out the photograph of the two of them laughing together in Russell Square. She folded it into a small square and slipped it into the zip pocket of her tracksuit. The bottle of antibacterial gel was on the desk, next to a set of keys. She hesitated, and then shoved them both in her satchel and left, closing the door gently behind her, careful not to wake Iqbal.

The satnav instructed her to follow an unfamiliar route. Stevie obeyed its directions, slipping along residential roads and dual carriageways, passing parks and parades of shops, moving in and out of darkness like a restless sleeper sliding in and out of consciousness.

London had always been a city of contrasts, but tonight it seemed a place divided into light and shadows. She travelled through streets where every gate was bolted, every shop shuttered, every window a closed unblinking eye. Then she would turn a corner into bright lights and see drinkers crowding pavements outside pubs whose closing bell should have rung hours ago.

Stevie stopped at a red light and saw a man standing beneath a flickering lamppost, raising his arms in the air. She rolled down her window and heard him shout, ‘The four horsemen of the Apocalypse have saddled their horses and are galloping towards us.’ He put a hand to his ear. ‘Can you hear their spurs? Do you feel their breath against your neck? Soon the honest dead will rise from their graves and all sinners will be cast into Hell’s fire.’ The man saw Stevie watching him and pointed at her. ‘You know the pain of burnt flesh. Imagine the pain of burning all over your body, for all time, all eternity . . .’

The lights changed and she drove on, but it was hard to make headway. People spilled into her path as if, now that they had flung off the division between night and day, the boundary between road and pavement no longer existed. There was a holiday recklessness to the crowds, a sense of ragged revelry. She wondered if this was how it had been in the old days, when families packed a picnic and treated themselves to an outing to Newgate to watch the hangings.

A flock of youths on undersized bikes tore across the Mini’s path, bandit-quick, hoods up, mouths and noses hidden behind scarves and surgical masks. They vanished up a side street, fast as smash-and-grab men. A bag slid from one of the boys’ handlebars as he rounded the corner. A bottle shattered, tins bounced and dented against the tarmac, and Stevie realised that their booty wasn’t from electrical stores, sportswear outlets or computer shops, but a supermarket. She turned a corner and saw the supermarket, squat and shining, its car park jammed worse than any Christmas Eve. Men and women struggled to their cars, pushing ill-balanced trolleys heavy with supplies. Stevie paused to watch. The shoppers had an anxious edge, but assistants were still tidying away abandoned trolleys and it was clear that the customers were hoarders and not looters. A car tooted impatiently behind her and Stevie moved on.

She was used to driving home in the early hours. The night-time city was a world beyond her windscreen, the preserve of drunks and police, of prostitutes, insomniacs, kerb crawlers and shift workers. She was used to stumblers and head-down walkers. But Stevie knew that London was unpredictable, a city that could explode into pitched battles, Molotov cocktails, burning cars and blazing buildings.

She drove cautiously, keeping to the rules of the road, until three buzz-cut-bald men approached her car at a red light, put their weight against its roof and started to rock it from side to side. They were chanting something, a football song she didn’t recognise. Stevie put a hand on the horn and her foot to the floor. Her right tyre skidded against the tarmac and she thought the Mini might roll, but the combination of horn and spinning wheels startled the men and they let go. After that she no longer bothered with traffic signals.

Busy streets held their terrors, but sliding back into the black, travelling the unfamiliar roads with only the glow of her headlamps to guide her, was even more unsettling. The unlit pavements looked deserted, but once her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, she caught glimpses of people moving in the darkness, and was glad of the knife in her bag.

She only stopped once on an unlit road, when a fox stepped into the Mini’s path and forced her to hit the brakes. The fox was skinny, its flanks hollow and scraggy, as if it had not quite recovered from a fight. But the creature stared at her, holding its ground, eyes gleaming like polished metal. Stevie tapped the horn. The fox blinked, gave her a last assessing look, and then trotted into the dark with no more haste than a family dog returning from a stroll. Stevie wondered if it sensed something afoot, a chance that it and its kind might soon have more sway.

She tuned the radio to Radio London and set the volume low, so it wouldn’t drown out the voice of the satnav. The presenter was interviewing a reporter somewhere on the streets of the city. Stevie thought she could detect a sense of excitement in the broadcasters’ voices, exhilaration that the news was right on their doorstep. The quiet hum of their words accompanied her journey: curfew . . . power failure . . . lack of manpower . . . looting . . . army . . . rationing . . . closures of nuclear facilities . . . food shortages . . . There was health advice too, instructions to stay at home, to drink plenty of water, to keep children indoors. Schools were closed and teaching suspended, though some had been reopened as official quarantine centres. There was a phone number for relatives of the sick to call, though once again the advice was to stay at home; going to hospital would only result in further delays.

The satnav instructed her to turn left. Stevie obeyed and the mechanical voice announced with a sense of pride that usually made her smile: You have reached your destination. She looked at the bonfire barricading the entrance to Melvin Summers’ street and whispered, ‘Thank you.’