Apocalypse Cow (17 page)

‘The smell,’ he confessed. ‘I just can’t get rid of it. It’s always there, like it’s inside me. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.’

Lesley made a big show of sniffing her armpit. ‘I haven’t washed for at least a week, plus I’m a smoker so my sense of smell is crap. I haven’t noticed.’

Terry’s heart leapt in his chest as they shared a smile.

A smoker
, he thought.
Why didn’t I think of that before?

‘Maybe we could both use a wash,’ he said. ‘There must be a bathroom.’

Lesley shook her head. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to go wandering about. There might be other open windows. Or other horny Scottie dogs.’

‘There’s a sink there.’ Terry nodded at a tiny basin in the corner of the room.

‘You have to promise not to look.’

‘Go ahead,’ Terry replied. ‘I promise.’

Terry squeezed his eyes shut. He heard the whisper of fabric as clothes were shucked. First the jacket, then the skirt. Then came a lighter sound – most likely the blouse. There was a pause and then the soft click of a bra being undone. When the water began running and he heard a sharp intake of breath, Terry eased open one eye.

Lesley was on tiptoes, completely naked. As she cupped her hands and poured water onto her armpits, she turned slightly and showed a delicious profile of a nipple stiffened by the
cold
water. Terry closed his eyes again. The last thing he needed was to get all hot and bothered in the robe, which would leave little to the imagination. But closing his eyes only made it worse as the splashing, gasping and moist, soapy rubbing continued. He pulled his legs up to his chest and tried to conjure up non-sexual images: the Queen on the toilet, Cliff Richard’s dancing, maggot soup. None of it worked. By the time Lesley was done, he was in no condition to stand up.

‘Your turn,’ she said.

‘I think I’ll wait a few minutes,’ Terry responded. ‘Psych myself up a little for the cold water.’

Terry opened his eyes. Lesley was back in her chair.

‘It’s actually quite refreshing,’ she said, stretching out her legs and looking around the room. ‘So where are we going to sleep?’

‘You take the chair,’ Terry offered. ‘I’ll sleep here. We should probably have a body up against the door. Just in case.’

‘Good plan.’

She fell silent long enough for Terry to think she was sleeping. He crossed to the sink, shuffling sideways to keep his back to her.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t look,’ Lesley said. ‘Not that it matters. I’ve already seen what you’ve got to offer.’

Terry’s ears burned as he slipped off the robe and turned on the tap. He had the uncomfortable sensation of an intent gaze on his back. When he turned around Lesley’s eyes were closed. He washed thoroughly, enjoying the luxury of using soap instead of just water, then dressed, if putting the scabby robe back on qualified as such, and returned to his station by the door.

‘Can you believe this is happening?’ Lesley asked.

‘Not really.’

‘I’m just grateful my parents don’t live in Britain.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘Kenya. They retired there. What about you?’

‘My parents are dead,’ Terry replied.

‘Sorry.’

Terry shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. I’ve got a cousin who lives near here. We’re not that close, though.’ He smiled softly. ‘Sometimes being alone pays off. You have nobody to lose.’

‘Considering the loner lifestyle only pays off when the country is besieged by zombie animals, I’m not sure that’s a glowing endorsement.’

There was silence for a few minutes, and then Lesley said, ‘They’ll be coming after us.’

Terry nodded. ‘Yeah, but we need to hole up for a few days to figure out our next move. I would invite you back to mine, but that would be the first place they would look. Same with your flat.’ He paused. ‘Come to think of it, we could try my cousin’s place. I should probably check he’s still alive too.’

‘You’re so thoughtful. You don’t think they’ll look for us there?’

‘He’s not my real cousin. His mum was a close friend, like an aunty, you know? So he won’t be listed as a family member.’

‘I don’t have any better ideas.’

Lesley’s voice was thick with sleep, but she was still looking at Terry, who tugged at his ear and said, ‘There is just one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He had some mental problems when we were younger.
He’s
mostly fine now, but I just want to warn you he can be a bit funny.’

‘What kind of mental problems?’

‘Oh, anger issues, obsessive behaviour, that kind of thing. Like I said, he’s better now. Mostly.’

‘You’re not really selling this to me.’

‘Fine. Basically, when he was five, his real parents – he’s adopted – would lock him in his room so they could go out boozing. One night they got killed in a nightclub fire. He was stuck there for three days before they identified the bodies. He had to eat his hamster to survive. It kind of fucked him up. He loved that hamster.’

Lesley yawned. ‘He sounds charming. I can’t wait to meet him.’

‘No, he’s much better now. He can just be a bit … gruff.’

‘I appreciate the warning.’ Lesley finished off her sentence with another jaw-cracking yawn. ‘Sleep now.’

She shifted a few times then settled, leaving Terry to think about his cousin. They had been close as kids, but drifted apart when Terry dropped out of university and went on a one-year trip around the world. It had been a few years since they’d last met, although they had exchanged a few desultory emails – the kind of three-liners you send to people you need to pretend you still care about but can’t actually be bothered keeping in touch with properly. Terry wasn’t sure what kind of welcome he would receive when he turned up with Lesley and a shot-up woman in tow. Knowing David, it probably wouldn’t be a terribly warm one.

10

Triple-word Quorn

Fanny placed a large casserole dish in the middle of the low dining table and whipped away the oven gloves with a flourish.

‘Dinner is served,’ she proclaimed.

When the round of applause she seemed to be expecting did not materialize, she began dishing out gloopy red stew. She took special care to plop the mixture forcefully into David’s bowl, sending piping hot sauce splattering across the tablecloth. David remained unscathed. Nonetheless, he looked ill at ease sitting cross-legged at the table: his voluminous buttocks were barely supported by a dainty purple cushion and his knees butted up against the underside of the table.

He eyed his portion suspiciously. ‘What is it this time?’

‘Something I went to great trouble to cook,’ Fanny answered tartly.

‘That’s code for root vegetable stew with couscous,’ Geldof said.

David looked as if he was about to say something, but
his
wife was glaring daggers at him. He simply sniffed.

‘Thank you, Fanny,’ Mary said. ‘This looks delicious.’

‘It’s no problem,’ Fanny replied, her clipped tone making it clear she considered herself an enormous martyr for going to the trouble of cooking, even though she had repeatedly turned down Mary’s offers of help in the kitchen.

Fanny set to eating and, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the others followed suit. From the downturned lips and absence of conversation around the table – the only sound was the clink of spoons and slurping from the twins – it was clear Fanny was not the only one unhappy with the new living arrangements, which had been in force for three days.

The day after the power died, the Peterses had been disturbed by a frantic hammering upon the front gate. Geldof, who was sitting in the living room trying to get his Rubik’s Cube solution time below forty seconds, opened the gate to the entire Alexander family. From the way they crowded forward the instant the gate was open, it was clear something was amiss. As he ushered them in, a low growl emanated from the other side of the fence.

It turned out the twins had nipped into the back garden to smoke the last of their illicit cigarette stash. There they encountered their neighbour’s Alsatian, now a growling, salivating monster. The twins scarpered back inside, thoughtlessly leaving the kitchen door open for the dog to follow. The family had to bail out of the front and high-tail it next door. Fanny had not been best pleased, but Geldof knew her conscience would not have allowed her to abandon people in need of help.

And so the seven of them were crammed into the house, too afraid to venture outside. Occasionally they heard
snuffling
, grunting and barking, gunfire, and what might have been distant screams. For the first time in his life, Geldof was grateful for the fence. Only James ventured out to pick vegetables, returning cross-eyed and with the sweet scent of smoke soaked into his clothes.

The worst thing for Geldof was living in close proximity to the twins. They weren’t bullying him, although the camaraderie he had thought they were enjoying after the field turned out to be a figment of his imagination. The house was simply too small for the twins to engage in any serious bullying without getting caught. Their presence still carried menace though, and without PSPs and other gadgets to hold their attention, they were becoming restless and therefore more likely to seek entertainment in Chinese burns and pile-ons without thought for the consequences.

But there were benefits. Mary and David had moved into his room, displacing him to the camp bed in the tiny spare room and forcing his parents to quit their boisterous lovemaking. Then there was the titillation of Mary sleeping in his bed, although his excitement had been tempered when he crept in to sniff the sheets only to inhale one of David’s pubic hairs, prompting a five-minute coughing fit. Alas, Mary didn’t float around in the flimsy nightgown he had always imagined, as she had been forced to flee without clothes and had to borrow a shapeless robe from Fanny. The robe was at least relatively short and had a tendency to flap open.

While Mary’s presence helped Geldof cope, the adults were not faring so well. James had obsessively, and fruitlessly, called his dealer until he dashed his phone against the wall and sat with his head in his hands for an hour. Now he was facing the horror of having to ration his weed. Geldof figured
he
was down to three joints a day, which meant he could actually string a sentence together.

Fanny and David were suffering their own withdrawal symptoms. Unable to indulge in her pastimes of strolling around the house naked and attempting to reduce James’s penis to a red raw nubbin through constant humping, Fanny ground her teeth and pulled at the neckline of her top as if it were choking her. David, who was going cold turkey from meat, was in much worse shape.

Geldof watched him as they ate. Mary was making ostentatious sounds of delight while her husband poked at a parsnip. The bags under his eyes were growing with each passing hour and he appeared simultaneously listless and edgy, a combination that left his cheek twitching constantly as he lay idle on the sofa all day. Mary was looking exhausted from the strain of having to constantly hover at his side, delivering elbow digs and nudges of the foot when it seemed he was about to be ungracious about the Peterses’ hospitality.

The lack of contact with the outside world compounded the stress. No power meant no TV, no internet and, after a few days, no mobile phones. Geldof, like many kids of his generation, had grown up surgically attached to his mobile, and he found his itchy thumbs twitching regularly, ghost-texting to his maths geek friends. The landlines had also gone down, removing even the old-fashioned way of keeping in touch. James had a battery-powered radio, but all they got in English was the emergency message – they found plenty of crackly channels on Long Wave in European languages none of them could understand.

And so they sat around the table in silence, chewing listlessly and trying not to make eye contact. Had they been close
friends
, being stuck together would have been bearable, maybe even fun. So far, each evening had ended with them sitting in uncomfortable silence amid flickering candlelight. That evening, though, as they scraped up the last few grains of couscous, Geldof decided drastic action was required to prevent him from going insane.

‘Let’s play Scrabble,’ he suggested.

At first, the game went well. Everybody perked up and the atmosphere lightened perceptibly. But Geldof had forgotten Scrabble lent itself to lively discussion. Among friends, such disputes were good-natured debates about whether ‘bantlebox’ was really a tiny insect that ate the holes out of Polo mints or whether it had been invented by a cheating sod hoping to use their letter X on a triple-word square. With two opponents not normally on the best of terms and further wound up by an animal apocalypse, they were a recipe for disaster.

The trouble began when David started laying down only meat-related words. Nobody paid much attention when he slapped down ‘beef’; after all, he only scored seven points for it. When his next word was ‘kebab’, Fanny twigged. She spelled out ‘carrot’ in response. She raised an eyebrow at David, like a chess Grand Master who has just backed her fiercest opponent into a corner with a cunning move. David went with ‘lamb’ next and Fanny countered with ‘nuts’. They then each missed several turns, no doubt reluctant to put down a word that did not aggravate the other. David eventually managed to squeeze out ‘salami’. His score was poor again, but he grunted with satisfaction as his last letter slid into place. Fanny threw down ‘leek’ in response, banging the tiles down so hard the other pieces shook.