Ice Diaries (3 page)

“I know. I found him in the snow
last night and dragged him here. He’s been asleep ever since.”

“Is he staying?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he’s
passing through, and will leave once he’s had a rest and some
food.”

Greg walked across to the sofa. “He’s
got blood on his jacket.”

I joined him. He was right – how
did I miss that? A big dark patch on the quilted lining. We stood for
a few seconds, gazing thoughtfully. Greg picked up the jacket for a
closer look, and the man erupted from the bedding and pulled a knife
on him. The sunlight flashed off a short business-like blade. He
stared at us in turn, bloodshot eyes narrowed, breathing fast. He was
bigger than I’d realized. His sweater was soaked in blood. We
edged away.

After a moment, Greg bent forward and
dropped the coat back where it came from. “Sorry.”

I suddenly felt annoyed. After all, I’d
saved this person’s life. “There’s no need to act
like an idiot. You’re making me wish I’d left you face
down in the snow. Put that away.” Slowly, he clicked the knife
closed and pocketed it, eyes still wary. “Is that your blood on
you?” He nodded. “Are you hungry?” He nodded again.
Clearly I was on my own with this conversation. I asked him something
he couldn’t answer with a nod. “What’s your name?”

“Morgan.”

“Morgan what?”

“It’s what Morgan, but
Morgan will do.”

Greg screwed up his face. “
What
is a funny name.”

I said, “I don’t know, what
about Wat Tyler? He was called Wat. The Peasants’ Revolt, 1381.
He was stabbed by the Lord Mayor of London.”

“Claire could call the baby Wat.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s
a good idea. Whenever people asked him his name, he’d say ‘Wat’
and they’d ask him again only louder.”

“They wouldn’t do that if
he was called Bart.”

“Good point. Maybe you could use
that argument to persuade Claire. Unless the baby’s already
answering to Toby.”

Conversations with Greg often have a
surreal quality I no longer notice. The stranger gazed from one of us
to the other, frowning slightly, as if we had suddenly started
talking in Ecclesiastical Latin. He felt in an inside pocket and held
out a coin. “I can pay for food.”

I took it, curious. A Krugerrand, heavy
in my hand. There’s an ounce of pure gold in a Krugerrand, but
they aren’t beautiful coins. They could easily have made them
much nicer, but their purpose was to make money from the global gold
coin market so they didn’t bother.

“This is no good to me.” I
handed it back. “We have a bartering system. Anyway, I wasn’t
going to charge you for breakfast. Or for lugging you here, or
letting you spend the night. You’ll just have to live with
being in my debt for now.”

He gave me a long look. “All
right.”

“Not at all, don’t mention
it.” I turned away and scanned the rows of tins. “Scotch
broth with corned beef?”

He nodded. While I opened the tins,
they both sat on the sofa and Greg told him our names and about our
little community, and asked him questions which Morgan answered
without giving much away. Greg didn’t appear to notice his
caginess.

“Where did you come from?”

“Up north. A fair way.”

“I slept on Tori’s sofa
when I first came, too. Then everyone helped me to find things for my
own place.”

“Who’s everyone?”

Greg counted on his fingers. “Paul
and Claire, they’ve just had a new baby, and they’ve got
Gemma too. Then there’s Charlie and Sam, they’ve got a
cat. The cat’s called Simone de Beauvoir, she’s black
with one white foot, and sometimes she scratches you when you’re
not expecting it, so I don’t stroke her in case she does. It’s
because people weren’t nice to her when she was a kitten, Sam
says.”

I scraped the contents of the tins into
a saucepan and roughly chopped the corned beef with the spatula. I
was never a great cook; now I’m a lousy one.

“I wanted a pet rat, but Nina
said I’d get a disease. I still might get one, though. A rat,
not a disease. You can train them. Tori says I don’t have to do
what Nina tells me. She needn’t know I’d got a rat, it
could stay in my pocket. They didn’t let you have pets at
Wingfield Gardens. I can have whatever I like where I live now.”

“Where’s that?”

Greg pointed through the window. “See
the building with the blue bits on it? I’m at the bottom there.
If I need Tori, only really badly though, not just to talk to or
something like that, then if I hang my red blanket out of the window
she’ll come over. And the same if she needs me. You could have
a flat there too. Have you got a pet?”

“No. D’you have any
petrol?”

“We don’t need it, we
haven’t got any cars. They wouldn’t work on the snow.”

“You can use petrol for other
things than cars. Generators, for instance.”

“We haven’t got a
generator.”

I tipped the corned beef/broth into a
dish and put it on the counter with a spoon and a glass of water.
Morgan moved to a stool and ate, emptying the bowl in two minutes
flat. Maybe I should have opened more tins. He looked up at me.

“Have you got any hydrogen
peroxide? There’s a cut I probably should do something about.”

“I’ve got Dettol and
bandages. Take off your top and let’s see.” I went to
fetch my book of medical advice and the first aid box from the
storeroom, had a thought and went back for my biggest sleep tee and
sloppy sweater. He couldn’t go on wearing his blood-soaked
clothes.

When I returned, Morgan was pulling a
tee shirt over his head, displaying powerful shoulders and narrow
waist, a black tribal tattoo across his upper back, and a couple of
round dog tags on a chain. There was also a lot of blood, dried and
oozing, and a gaping three inch knife slash on the left side of his
ribs. Greg and I both did a quick intake of breath. I felt queasy.

“How did you get that?”

“In a fight.”

“Who with?”

“Just some guy I annoyed.”

While Greg took up this topic without
eliciting much in the way of concrete information, I opened
Home
First Aid.

Wash the cut with soap and water and
keep it clean and dry … hydrogen peroxide and iodine can be
used to clean the wound. Apply antibiotic ointment and keep the wound
covered … change the dressing two or three times a day. Seek
medical care within six hours if the wound needs stitches …
any delay can increase the rate of wound infection.

I washed my hands and tipped hot water
in a mixing bowl, added Dettol, opened a new sponge from its
cellophane and a new bar of soap and sat on the stool beside Morgan.
There was a lot of him, all of it muscle. Stupidly, I felt myself
blushing. It was a year since I’d been this close to a man who
wasn’t wearing at least three woolly layers of clothing. When I
bent to examine the wound my head brushed his beard. I could smell
his sweat and hair and blood. I busied myself cleaning the cut, then
the area round the cut, guilt taking over from embarrassment. This
should have been done last night. I’d known something was wrong
but had been too tired to pursue it, and if he got an infection and
died of blood poisoning it’d be my fault. He sat unflinching,
though it must have hurt a lot. I got fresh water and washed the cut
again, twice, dabbed it dry with tissues, applied Neosporin cream and
looked at it dubiously.

“D’you want me to try to
bring the edges together with plasters?”

“That might make it more likely
to go bad. Leave it, just tape some lint over.”

“How do you feel?”

“I’ve felt better.”

“You should drink lots of water
to flush out the germs. I’ve got a random collection of
antibiotics, but I don’t know which ones would work for this.
But we can try them if you get a fever.”

“Whatever. I’m going to
sleep. Wake me for meals.”

Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian

I suppose I should write a bit about
the two great disasters that happened – not that this is an
attempt to be a historical record or anything, but my story doesn’t
make much sense without knowing, and someone may come across this
notebook years in the future when it’s all been forgotten. I’m
not going to dwell on it, just give the outline and get on with other
things. You can skip this part if you like. Here goes.

First the pandemic struck; I heard
about the early victims on the radio, and didn’t take much
notice. I thought it was another media-fuelled scare, like bird flu.
I was wrong. People got ill, and died within two days; later their
relatives and flatmates and work colleagues and people who’d
been on the same bus with them got ill. I remember the moment when I
took on board this was something major that would affect people I
knew. Deaths were counted in hundreds, then thousands, then millions.
Those who had a holiday home abroad left the country, taking the
disease with them as often as not.

The government told everyone not to
panic, and put their best scientists into finding out what the
disease was – easy – and working out what to do about it,
which proved too great a task for the time remaining to them. They
called it SIRCS, to the annoyance of several organizations with the
same acronym: severe immune response coronavirus syndrome. A Chinese
businessman called Guozhi Ng had brought the infection from Asia;
later every single passenger and crew member on his plane died.

SIRCS was a hybrid disease as deadly as
bubonic plague and as infectious as the common cold, and became a
global problem within a week. Fear and chaos took hold. The
government declared a state of emergency, and asked everyone except
essential workers to stay at home. Cinemas, theatres and restaurants
closed. Tubes and buses didn’t run. Face masks were delivered
to every door and we all wore them, while doubting their efficacy.
The power cuts started then, as key workers failed to turn up for
work. There were bodies in the streets. The army moved the dead in
trucks to makeshift burial grounds in the countryside. Friends of
mine died, but not the two people I cared most about, David or my
mother. Some people didn’t seem to catch SIRCS; but most did.

Then it started to snow in the north.

The weather had been weird for some
time – we kept having the driest month since records began, the
wettest, the windiest, the hottest, the coldest – and experts
reassured us that these unseasonable variations were all within
normal parameters. But in May 2017 temperatures dropped and snow fell
and didn’t stop.

At this point everything broke down.
Metres of snow covered Scotland, and spread inexorably down the
country. There was talk of a new ice age, that Arctic seas had warmed
and turned off the Gulf Stream. People who could headed south.
Electricity was more off than on, there was no gas, phones worked
intermittently, television went off the air and only the World
Service remained on the radio. Some sites on the internet worked and
others went down as servers crashed. Roads were blocked, so transport
couldn’t bring food to the shops, but as the snow levels rose,
people couldn’t get to the shops anyway. Homes were being
buried under snow. The cold began to kill those who had so far
survived the pandemic. The hastily formed coalition government,
consisting of only about a dozen MPs, decided to get everyone out of
the country, a mass exodus to warmer parts of the world using every
helicopter, plane and boat available. Southern European countries
volunteered to fly mercy missions to the UK. It was assumed our
people would be welcomed by countries that had lost ninety per cent
of their population.

David and I agreed we’d each go
to make sure our parents were okay. Before the phones stopped
working, I rang my mother. They were evacuating her part of London. I
told her I was on my way, and not to worry about me if they arrived
first; to go with them, but leave a note telling me where she’d
gone. I’d follow.

It took me two days to reach Mum’s
flat in Hampstead. I hadn’t realized how difficult the journey
would be. Blown by a high wind, soft snow had drifted and eddied into
hills and dips around the buildings. I broke into a house when it got
dark to sleep. When I reached the right street, the whole area
appeared deserted; I didn’t see another soul. The helicopters
had come and gone. I climbed through a fourth floor window and went
up the stairs and let myself in.

The flat seemed icier than outside. She
was in bed, blankets, towels, clothes and even a rug from the floor
piled over her. I saw at once she was dead. Beside her a note, the
writing straggling down the page.

Dearest Tot,

I don’t think I am going to
last till they come, I’m sorry.

Don’t be sad. That is the last
thing I want for you. I had a good life and am hugely proud of my
beautiful clever daughter. I hate the thought of you being sad over
me. Take the greatest care of yourself for my sake. I’ll be
really cross, wherever I am, if you don’t.

All my love, always,

Mum

XXX

After a bit, I went back home. Except
that when I got there, my building had disappeared beneath the snow,
and everyone had gone. David never returned from going to find his
parents. Eventually I ran into Paul and Claire, and stayed with them
for a while. There were dogs roaming in packs back then, and now I
wish I’d kept one, but at the time I was barely able to keep
myself.

In the face of disaster, you can either
give up or get on with life. I decided to live.

Ice Diaries ~ Lexi Revellian

Wednesday and Thursday were much the
same as always, apart from the presence of Morgan, either hunched
fast asleep under the duvets on the sofa, only the top of his head
visible, or bolting quantities of food at the counter, monosyllabic.
A bit like having a teenager living with me; but not talking suited
me fine. Somehow I doubted we’d have much in common to chat
about. I wasn’t keen on sharing my space, but there wasn’t
anywhere else for him to go, and I assumed he’d be off as soon
as possible. He must have been going somewhere when I found him. I
did my best to behave as if he was not there, and get on with the
things I had to do. Survival is arduous.