A Winter Grave

Chapter Three

An air-conditioning fan rattled and whirred behind the rusted grill in the ceiling. Rain thundered on a skylight that spilled bruised daylight into the waiting room. The sound of the large-screen television fixed high up on the far wall was only just audible above it. Discoloured plastic chairs stood lined up against three walls, facing a low square table in the centre of the room. The table groaned with grubby, dog-eared magazines, and Brodie imagined them to be contaminated by the invisible bacterial and viral infections carried by all of the sick patients who had handled them.

The walls of the room had not been painted in years, and were stained with damp and scarred by the backs of chairs. It was empty when Brodie first entered, dripping rainwater on the floor after a perilous ride through flooded streets in the open electric taxi boat he had caught at one of the temporary south-side jetties. Private boats for hire clustered around all the jetties like so many feeding fish.

He was always depressed by the rain-streaked sandstone tenements that lined the streets. They stood between the gap sites like the few remaining rotten teeth in a sad smile. Abandoned like the tower blocks and the newer social housing. Shop windows had been boarded up long ago, and were almost obscured by graffiti. The Citizens Theatre in Gorbals Street had been forced to close its doors permanently after almost a hundred years of productions on the stage of what had once been known as the Royal Princess’s Theatre. All the drama these days played out on water in the streets around it.

For a while he had sat on his own in the waiting room, feeling the air thicken with humidity, before an elderly man in a flat cap and dripping grey raincoat pushed open the door and took a seat against the far wall. After the briefest nod of acknowledgement, he had begun amusing himself by stamping on the cockroaches scuttling across the tiles. The hardy German variety of the insect that infested the city had moved indoors to survive the falling temperatures which had come unexpectedly with climate change. The little bastards were hard to kill. Brodie watched, fascinated, for a while, before finding himself drawn by a familiar jingle interrupting a succession of annoying infomercials on the television. The equally irritating jingle was the one adopted by the Eco Party to herald its endless political party broadcasts ahead of the imminent election.

The incumbent Scottish Democratic Party, led by the charismatic Sally Mack, was well ahead in the polls. The SDP, unlike the EP, did not seem to feel the need to constantly badger the electorate for their votes. Which imbued them, somehow, with a reassuring sense of self-confidence, even superiority. The Scottish Tories had long since faded into oblivion, leaving the Ecologists as the only genuine opposition. But there was a sense of desperation in their floundering campaign as election day approached.

Their latest offering was a rerun of the testimony given to a US Senate committee by the famous twentieth-century American scientist Carl Sagan in 1985. Dark hair, greying at the temples, fell carelessly around his large skull. His face was dominated by huge teardrop glasses, a reflection perhaps of his fear for the future. But his voice was almost soporifically calm, despite the tenor of his subject. Climate change. A favourite topic of the Eco Party. A concern, Brodie thought, that was thirty years and more too late. In fact, more than twice that, if Sagan was to be believed.

In his evidence on climate change, he told the senators, ‘Because the effects occupy more than a human generation, there is a tendency to say that they are not our problem. Of course, then, they are nobody’s problem. Not on my tour of duty. Not on my term of office. It’s something for the next century. Let the next century worry about it.’

Brodie shook his head. They were halfway through the next century, and the fact that nobody had done nearly enough worrying about it was self-evident.

‘And so,’ Sagan went on, ‘in this issue, as in so many other issues, we are passing on extremely grave problems to our children, when the time to solve the problems, if they can be solved at all, is now.’

Brodie could barely hear him above the rain hammering on the skylight.

‘The solution to this problem requires a perspective that embraces the planet and the future, because we are all in this greenhouse together.’

Out of interest, Brodie slipped on his new glasses. He felt the magnets lock into place as the legs connected with the earpieces he and his fellow officers had been asked to wear while on duty, and he requested his iCom to scan the Sagan video for authenticity. The old man on the other side of the waiting room looked up momentarily from his cockroach squashing, and wondered who Brodie was talking to.

As his iCom performed its scan, Brodie noticed a cockroach crawling across the lower portion of Sagan’s face, reaching his lips as he spoke. Brodie almost expected it to disappear into his mouth, choking off the words of warning. Scan completed, flashed up on his screen. Video authenticated. So, the Eco Party was correct in its assertion that the world had been given notice more than sixty years ago.

A grim-faced Eco spokesman appeared on-screen, urging voters to crush the Democrats at the polls, as if somehow the climate change afflicting them had been brought about solely by the SDP.

Brodie pushed the glasses up on to his forehead and sighed his frustration. He hated politics. Politicians all told lies. Lies that changed depending on what demographic they were appealing to.

The sudden opening of the door from the doctor’s surgery startled him back to the grim reality of the waiting room. A middle-aged woman, head bowed, hurried past and out into the hall to negotiate the gloomy curve of the stairs down to the flooded streets below.

The doctor was a good ten years younger than Brodie and almost completely bald. He wore a tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses, and waved Brodie into his inner sanctum. He beckoned the policeman absently towards a seat, closed the door and rounded his desk, distracted.

‘Fucking cockroaches,’ he said, and Brodie blinked in surprise. The doctor never once looked at him as he shuffled through the plethora of papers on his desk. ‘The extermination people were supposed to come last week. We’re overrun with the damn things. Little fuckers are everywhere. This is a doctor’s surgery, for Christ’s sake. It’s supposed to be a sanitary environment.’ He looked up for the first time. ‘Do you have any idea what kind of diseases are carried by cockroaches?’

Brodie didn’t.

‘Dysentery, gastroenteritis, salmonella...’ The doctor waved frustrated arms and slumped into his seat. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace.’ Scanning his desk again, he pulled a folder towards him to open it up and examine the contents. He rubbed the bristles on his chin and Brodie heard the scrape of them against the soft skin of his palm. He turned gloomy eyes towards his patient. ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’

Brodie emerged from the doctor’s surgery, back into the waiting room, like a man in a trance. As if every nerve in his body had suddenly surrendered perception. He had no sense of putting one foot in front of the other. Breathing had become a conscious act that required concentration. The tinnitus in his ears drowned out the world.

The old man in the flat cap and raincoat pushed past him in his hurry to enter the surgery, as if someone might suddenly appear to jump his place in a non-existent queue. Brodie heard the door behind him close. He stopped, standing in the waiting room below the green-blue light of the window above. He was not conscious of thinking about anything.

Then, incongruously, he became aware of the Carl Sagan interview replaying on the TV. We are passing on extremely grave problems to our children. And his eyes flickered towards the screen. The remains of the cockroach were smeared across his mouth. Its brown innards and smashed wings stuck to a rolled-up magazine lying on the table.

Rain still battered the glass overhead. The air-conditioning fan still whirred and rattled behind its rusted grill. Nothing had changed. Except everything had.

Outside, he saw a group of water taxis gathered beneath a cluster of umbrellas at the entrance to the waterlogged car park of the Central Mosque. The drivers were playing cards under black protective oiled cloth, and only by shouting was he able to attract their attention. One of them reluctantly disengaged, swinging his tiller and directing his shallow-draft boat silently in the direction of the medical centre.

‘Where you going, pal?’

‘Suspension bridge, Carlton Place.’

The driver breathed his frustration. ‘Hardly worth the fucking fare.’

‘How else am I supposed to get there?’

He shook his head. ‘Get in.’

Brodie clambered into the front of the boat and sat watching the buildings drift by in the rain. The mosque had been closed for several years. The underground, once known as the Clockwork Orange because of its single circle and orange trains, had been flooded in the first storm surges and never reopened. Nearby shops and apartments had been ruthlessly looted in the early days of the initial flooding. And although there was no longer anything of value left to steal, these were still dangerous streets after dark. Gangs of white youths roamed in high-powered boats looking for trouble, searching out the Asian immigrants who had poured into the country over the last decade to colonise large parts of this cold northern city, escaping disastrous flooding and crop failure on the subcontinent.

But, in truth, he saw nothing but the fading light of his own mortality. Of course, we were all going to die sometime. But it is a very human trait to lock that thought away, to face it when keeping it in the dark is no longer viable. You know that one day it will seek you out, but are never prepared for it when it does. The doctor’s words still rattled about in his head.

You have severe and rapid-moving prostate cancer. Unfortunately, it has metasticised to the bone. Ribs, hips, the small intestine...

Strangely, except for the blood in his urine that had prompted the first visit to the doctor, he felt fine. There were the occasional bouts of fatigue, and the difficulty he had some nights in sleeping. But, then, he had never been a good sleeper. Not since that long ago night in the dark under the King George V Bridge on the Clyde.

His boat turned into Carlton Place. Falling behind in the building of levees, the Glasgow prefecture had belatedly undertaken work to raise the entire suspension bridge, which still only just cleared the water during the worst storm surges. The disgruntled driver dropped Brodie at the foot of the steps and examined the handful of coins placed in his hand. ‘Make more at the fucking poker,’ he said, and spun his boat away to hurry back to the game, sending a wash of black water sloshing into the flooded basements of the buildings that lined this once grand terrace. The Sheriff Court at the end of the street had been built above street level, with steps leading up to its entrance. Opened in 1986, it was almost as if the architect who designed it had taken heed of Carl Sagan’s warning and placed the administration of justice beyond the reach of rising sea levels and storm surges.

Brodie walked across the bridge, the rain slashing his face. It was ice-cold, and numbed his skin as effectively as the doctor’s words had numbed his senses. There was no room for fear. Just a yawning, aching emptiness.