"personal demons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowler Christopher)

So that the dense sound of ticking was gradually stripped away, like members of a performing orchestra laying down their instruments one after the next. The Sultan was paralysed by the phenomenon. With each stopped clock his heart grew a thousandth part weaker. After eight years, Sabin was winding the clocks so little that time's elasticity had been stretched to breaking point.
Shay-Tarrazin's eyes widened in horror as he dimly realised that his life must cease with the stopping of the final clock, and that for him, as it eventually did for everyone, time would soon terminate altogether. The ticking grew thinner and thinner as pendulums stilled, movements stopped moving, gems and sand and water ceased to pour, suns and moons no longer followed one another, and as the hands of the last clock ceased their movement around its calibrated surface, the Sultan's heartbeat demurred to the point of extinction, his body seizing into silence. He fell gently from the platform, cushioned by his saffron robes, into the great gold-filigree case of his best-loved Ormolu clock, where he lay unaided by his snoozing retinue.
As Sabin was the only man in the kingdom who had learned to master time, he assumed the responsibility of helping to bury the Sultan and attend his mourning rituals. Even the Grand Vizier (once he could be found and woken) agreed that this was appropriate and seemly.
The clocks were never wound again. The once-great empire of Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin never emerged from its reverie. Sabin Darr was finally granted the freedom of the kingdom. He resolved to return to his village, and requested the slave-girl Safieh as a reward for his unstinting loyalty to the Sultan. The Grand Vizier was happy to grant him this, and to seal good fortune on the couple's union, presented them with a golden clock.
The hands of the clock did not move. Its interior mechanism had been removed, and the case had been filled with diamonds and sapphires.
For Sabin Darr, who had lost his family and his fingers, but not his sense of time, the world started to revolve once more.


INNER FIRE

He had been gingerly attempting to unfold a copy of the Sunday Times, but the newspaper snapped apart in his hands and shattered into dozens of pieces. Kallie swore angrily as he shovelled the shards into a pile with his boot; some of the broken edges were razor-sharp. There was nothing else to read in the apartment except his father's books, but there was no way of getting them off the shelves without a blowtorch, which he figured would somewhat defeat the object. Someone had given him some old magazines, but these were now stuck fast to the kitchen table, their covers rippled together in a lurid mosaic.
Kallie wondered how much longer Bennett would be. He had gone to the shops three days ago - or was it four? Perhaps he'd run into friends and gone to stay with them. Well, good riddance. Bennett had been camping out on the sofa for over two months now. Not bad for a guy who was 'just passing through the neighbourhood'. He had supposedly called in to see how his old schoolfriend was faring, but in the last eight weeks all he had done was empty the larder and try to repair the refrigerator. The refrigerator! Why in the name of everything perverse would he want to do that? The only reason Kallie hadn't thrown it out into the hall was because it would not fit through the kitchen door, which his father had replaced after drunkenly burning the old one two years ago.
He walked over to the window and rubbed away a patch of ice with the back of his glove. Across the street was the bus depot where no buses ever ran. Not too many people passed by, either. Most had learned their lesson the hard way, leaving the comparative warmth of their homes only to become disoriented in the blizzards and stumble into snowdrifts. It didn't take long for a body to cool down in these temperatures. His father had been fond of describing a time when you could see the curving green meadow of Primrose Hill from the bedroom windows. All Kallie had ever seen was a perpetual ice-haze hanging in the air, obscuring a sun that at its best was as watery as an uncooked egg.
There seemed little point in trying to lead a normal life now. Everything conspired against it. The solution, his eternally optimistic father had always told him, was to stay busy. Edward had stayed busy right until the end, refusing to acknowledge the fact that he was slowing down, moving with ever-increasing decrepitude, like a clockwork toy at the end of its winding. Finally he had overestimated his stamina on a trip to town and had failed to make it back to safety before a storm of truly biblical proportions had set in. The blizzard lasted for over three months. When it subsided, the landscape had changed its proportions entirely, and his father had presumably become part of the great permafrost ridge that separated North London from the city centre.
Kallie realised with a shock that he was cold. Cold. Normally the word held little meaning. It was a permanent state of being, an endless dull ache in his bones, a spiteful stinging in his nerve ends, a dead sensation that dragged at his limbs, numbing his extremities, slowing his brain and thickening his blood. He forced himself to think. It was his only defence against the pervasive cold. Physical exercise brought only a temporary respite, sweat turning to icewater. He looked about the barren grey room, as uninviting as a Soviet state flat, and forced himself to think.
The only problem with Bennett not coming back was that Bennett had taken his wallet, ostensibly to buy food. The reason for deciding to trust a man who had never shown an ounce of reliability was obscure to him now. He looked over at the telephone, willing it to ring. It wouldn't, of course, even if Bennett had bothered to note the number. The mechanism was encrusted in ice, as indeed was the entire exchange, although he had heard a rumour that certain members of parliament could still operate some kind of closed circuit telecommunication system - presumably for use in emergencies.
Well, what was it now if not an emergency? The entire apartment, the entire apartment complex, the entire city, the entire country was frozen solid, and had been for twenty-two years, and with each passing year it grew a little colder, a little more still and silent, as the national heartbeat slowed to a weak and distanced blip.
Kallie was twenty-four years old, but held no memory of those fabulous sun-soaked times before the great freeze. Like a man blind from birth, he had not even been granted the pleasure of memories. Bennett was a year or so older, and swore he could recall laying in long grass with the sun in his eyes, so light and bright it hurt to look into the sky. But almost everything that came out of his mouth was a lie. He said he had seen shops open in Oxford Street. He said he knew people who could take them South, far beyond the reach of the ice. He said if they waited inside long enough the government would find a way to make it warmer. All lies. But he was right about one thing; they could not survive without food. That was why Kallie let him go. They had been living on beans and tinned luncheon meat, which was edible if you made a couple of holes in the lid of the can and gently heated it over the stove. But ten days ago the last gas ring had ceased to work, even though the council had promised to keep the pipes clear. There was no news coming in at all now that Mr Jakobowski had stopped calling by. Perhaps it was over; the last warm body had chilled to a blue cadaver and the city was finally a postcard snowscape.
And perhaps Bennett had found a pub open somewhere and was spending his money with a bunch of his drunken mates. Kallie knew there was nothing for it but to find out for himself and go outside. He would certainly die if he stayed here. His last source of heat - the gas ring - had packed in. The electricity still worked intermittently, but there were no electric radiators to be had, not unless you were rich enough to buy one on the black market. There was nothing left to eat except boxes of dry cereal, and he hadn't any milk to put on them. In the last few days, the temperature in the apartment had plunged, although he imagined it was still a long way above the subzeros in the street below. It hadn't helped that he had thrown his typewriter through the window in a fit of temper two days ago. The keys had jammed, and he lacked the patience - and the required agility of his numbed fingers - to repair it. What alarmed him more was the fact that he no longer really cared what happened to him. It would be easy to escape this bitter place; he just had to open all the windows, remove his greatcoat and lay down on the bed for a few minutes. Perhaps that was his only choice. But not just yet. Not before he visited the outside world one last time.
He added an itchy red woollen sweater to the other layers of his clothing, then wound a scarf around his chest. Over this he struggled into his greatcoat, dug out leather gloves with split seams, tucked his jeans into the tops of his battered Caterpillar boots.
When he unlatched the front door and looked out, he was surprised to find snow drifting in the hall. It had been nearly two months since his last foray into the streets of what had once recognisably been Camden Town. The tall windows at the end of the floor had been broken by children, and the snow had formed a drift below the sill. If any of his neighbours still lived in the building, they were not prepared to answer his knock. Kallie rapped on Mr Jakobowski's door and listened with his ear placed to the peeling brown paintwork.
'Mr Jakobowski, I'm going outside. Do you want me to get you anything?'
He was sure he could hear someone moving around in the sitting room, but what could he do if the old man wasn't prepared to let anyone help him? In these strange times, who knew how people would behave? Something electrical hummed beyond the door. It sounded as if he had a radiator running in there. People jealously hoarded their heat sources. Who could blame them? Heat was hard to share; if you opened the circle it dissipated. He called a few more times, then gave up. In the past, when he had found anything he thought the old man might like, he would haul it home and leave it against his door. But the good-neighbour rules were no longer in force; now it was every man for himself.
Down the icy stairwell - the lift had not worked in thirteen years - to the front door, which was so frozen shut that Kallie assumed no-one had been in or out since Bennett had left with the contents of his wallet. Deadening whiteness glared in through the window panels. He would need to find sunglasses. He had tried to pick up ski equipment from Lillywhites the last time he was in town, but - surprise, surprise - they had sold out. Only a handful of staff still manned the store, keeping up the old conventions. He had worked there himself once, bored out of his mind, waiting to seize upon the odd straggling customer who had made it in through the snow. That was back when the market was still trying to cope with the crisis, when the rich warm nations were still exporting to their poor frozen neighbours. Now that those neighbours had ceased to earn wages, there was no point in supplying them with affordable products. The milk of human kindness had been the first thing to freeze.
Throwing his weight against the door, he shifted it wide enough to push his way through. Bayonets of ice divorced themselves from the lintel and fell about him, cutting stencils into the swathes of snow that crusted the steps. Kallie raised his face into the biting wind and looked along the street, in the direction of the city. The air stole his breath, forcing a gasp with the realisation that it was far colder than anything he had experienced before.
Snow dunes, sparkling like hills of granulated jewels, swept in great unspoilt arcs across a bleached Sahara of roads and pavements. This was a bad sign; the route had been passable the last time he ventured out. But now even those high-profile charity missions the government was fond of announcing had ceased while everyone sorted out the problems in their own back yards.
On his last trip, Kallie had seen a few heavy-traction vehicles lumbering toward town. No people, though. There were never any people. It was simply too dangerous to set out on your own. He vaguely recalled a shopping expedition with his parents, and some friends of theirs who owned a car fitted with snowtyres. His mother had bought crazy things, pointless things, floral dresses and summer blouses she would never be warm enough to wear. Anxious to be rid of their stock, the storekeepers had been bargained down to nothing. He would always remember his mother laughing in front of the mirror as she held the diaphanous chiffon material against her. Ironically, her refusal to lose hope had brought her to a protracted, painful end.
What had instilled his parents with such unreasoning optimism? Was it because they remembered a time when their world was a cacophony of movement and sound, when trees still flowered, when their vision was saturated with rainbow colours? Had they never lost sight of life's possibilities? Is that why they had allowed him to be born?
It took forty minutes to reach the deserted high street, silent but for the wind that moaned eerily around the corners of buildings like a widow at a wake. At Camden Lock the ice in the canals had expanded and crushed itself upwards into fantastic twisted geometries. Kallie pulled the fur hood of his coat tighter around his face and concentrated on placing one foot before the other. The secret was to keep moving, always keep moving.
There were no shops open at all in the high street. This was a worrying new development. Surely some signs of life still existed? In the last few years he had seen fewer and fewer people on the crystalline streets. Many had found ways of moving to the southern hemisphere. Some had chosen to stay because they were determined to rebuild their lives in the face of the changed climate. And there were the others, the ones who had no money and no way of leaving alive.
As he trudged on, staying wide of the treacherously deep drifts, he remembered a picture he had seen once, a framed tube poster from the 1930s. The fanciful painting showed a gigantic cherub with translucent blue skin, a symbolic representation of the North Wind, perched on the roof of Oxford Circus tube station, breathing icy air down over the scurrying populace. The message was something about getting in out of the cold. Such bright pigments, such warmth, all gone now, gone forever. The sheer white force of snow and ice blotted every other colour from the landscape.
He resolved to walk as far as the giant supermarket at the end of the road, and no further. Beyond lay the crusted ridge of permafrost that had built up in the warring crosswinds of the Euston Road. Passing near it always unnerved him; there were people in the ice, frost-blackened hands and faces staring out like half-uncovered statues. It wasn't right that they had been left there, but what could anyone do? After a few years the ice turned to stone, shifting and rupturing like the tectonic plates of the earth.
The Safeway car park was almost empty. The attendant's barrier was up, and from the lack of tyre tracks it looked like nothing had driven in or out for days. The long glass wall of the supermarket glittered with frost, and was covered in starburst cracks where the great weight of snow was slowly pushing it in, but at least the lights were still on inside, and that meant the store was open for business. Kallie had no money on him, but with luck there would be no staff to operate the tills. Many people continued to conduct a semblance of normal life, as if determined to prove that the British could remain polite in the direst of circumstances, but were easily turned from their daily tasks. Nothing could be relied upon any more, beyond the fact that the situation would worsen.
The only advantage of the new cold climate was that food stayed fresher. Just as well; supplies were sporadic and perverse. Trucks would deliver great quantities of razorblades or suntan lotion, but there would be no bread or meat. Sometimes fresh-looking food would prove to have been frozen for years, and was impossible to thaw.
The temperature inside the store was, oddly enough, too high. Because of the value of its vast cold storage capacity, Safeway operated on its own generator but the thermostats must have become damaged in the recent storms. To be hit by the smell of rotting meat was one final cruel consumerist joke to play on the few half-starved members of the public who still ventured through its doors.
Kallie unbuttoned his coat and fought the desire to vomit as he tried to ignore the sweet, ripe smell of putrifying vegetables. It was no use trying to refreeze food that had thawed. He would have to stick to tins again.
'Hey, Kallie.' He looked along the aisle to see an old friend of his mother's, Mrs Quintero, waving her bad hand at him. She had lost three fingers to frostbite last winter, and had not had the wounds properly dressed. The black stumps of her distended knuckles suppurated through filthy bandages. He was not surprised to see her; she lived here in the store. Besides, there were only a few people who visited the outside world with any regularity these days, and one tended to see the same faces.
'The heating came back on, Kallie, can you believe it? Seventy-two degrees! Everything's gone off. The one place it needed to be cold.'
'Hasn't the professor been able to fix it?'
'Are you kidding? He hasn't a practical bone in his body. I wish you would take a look.'
'Have there been any shipments lately?' he called back, ignoring her request. If he moved any closer she would come over and hug him, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. He hated anyone touching him.
'I don't know. I've been staying in. My husband's been really sick.' She shoved a wedge of peroxided hair from her dark-rimmed eyes. He wondered why on earth she still bothered to wear make-up. 'You heard anything?'
It was the most common question of all. Everyone expected some kind of government-authorised announcement to be made. Crisis over, it's safe to come out, that kind of thing. But it had not happened in his lifetime, and he doubted it could ever happen, or that there was still a government that could make any sort of announcement. Things had moved too far away from the norm now. How could their former lives ever be restored?
'We've had a few people call in, but nobody with any news. Been ages since we had news. A crowd of rough kids came by this week, stole the coffee vending machine, really noisy types. Of course, you don't remember when the whole world was noisy.' She looked around, too sharp, too anxious. 'It's so quiet now. The snow deadens everything, but oh! it never used to be like this.'
'Things change,' Kallie shrugged, keen to move on.
'I used to work in an office,' she continued, desperate to be understood, 'I was good at my job, and always busy, no time to stop. And the noise! Telephones, typewriters, and buses out in the street, people calling to each other. Televisions just left on. Singing at Christmas as we left the pub. Sometimes you had to shout to be heard. Now you can almost hear yourself think. Noise was life.' She blinked and shook her head, too frightened to speak.
'I have to go, Mrs Quintero.'
'The professor's in the stockroom giving a class.' She had turned away, unwilling to share her distress. 'My two are in there with him.'
'I'll look in and say hi,' he assured her, even though he did not want to.
'There's tinned peaches in syrup on Aisle 6, and powdered eggs,' she added listlessly. 'Make sure you take some. You need to keep your strength up.'