The Crack (10 page)

Rise! And fly across the exhausted waters at my side.

Unthinkingly, everyone turned to Brother Cornelius for an explanation. He cleared his throat and assumed an important expression. ‘Brothers,' he began.

‘But it didn't say brothers,' Ebbing-Smith cried in exasperation.
‘It said sisters. What is the meaning of all this, for God's sake?'

‘It is God who knows,' Brother Cornelius stalled.

‘Exhausted waters,' ruminated Potts. He had been clever at school but had always done what he could to hide the fact. ‘It sounds to me as if something's going on on the other side of the river.' ‘Battersea?' the rugger blue said truculently. ‘What could be going on there?'

Baba, pushing her way through the pin-stripes and shark-skin, piped up eagerly. ‘It's all to do with a witch called Medea Smith,' she said. ‘She's trying to get everyone to cross over there and have a new life. But don't go – I mean –'

Baba went unheard, she and Brother Cornelius being pushed to one side as the men shook the transistor violently for further news.

‘Sisters!' – the voice came shrill and frightened this time – ‘Come to my aid! The wicked prince is overcoming us with his armies!'

The strongest of the Playboy patrons stood back at the wild crackling that emanated from the transistor. Pale, their minds racing and school memories re-activated as never before, they stared at each other in wild surmise.

Brother Cornelius dropped to his knees. Instinctively, Baba edged away, her tail guiding her to the exit and to safety.

The sounds of warfare and killing from the transistor grew until the doomed bar seemed no more than a vibrating hell, a black hole of exploding noise.

Then another sound – the now familiar sound of ripping, splitting, tearing masonry – overlaid the vindictive battle of the sexes on the transistor. The ether trembled at the decibel-force, and Baba could have sworn that red waves, like a dancing tide of lava, lapped the shadowy walls of the bar.

A great crack ran the length of the red plush carpeting. At first no more than an incision of scalpel fineness, it widened with hideous ease, swallowing in one gulp a handful of low tables and soft chairs, and darted to the bar, which split helplessly at its advance. The barman, shaker in hand, fell like a statuette into the void where a moment before his feet had stood.

The group of men, horror imprinted on their immobile faces, went down rigidly. A school photograph, the first and second eleven, they toppled sideways in a cardboard pose of death and vanished forever from Baba's life.

She gave a soft scream. Only Brother Cornelius remained, on his knees, praying by the edge of the crack. His lips moved silently – and in a horrifying parody of his prayer the lips of the crack moved too, glancing in a smile of derision at the toppling piano, yawning in an Amen of disaster as it stretched wide to include him. Baba, pushed against the far wall, found herself falling too – but away from the crack, down the bowed staircase of the Playboy, out into the street.

And the street was no more than the side of a steep hill now.

The pets had disappeared, buried under the new Lake District of Hyde Park and Park Lane. The remains of the funfair were entirely submerged.

Baba had no idea where she was going. She rolled fast, so fast she was hardly conscious of the pain from the jagged tube trains, the nips and nudges from broken sewage pipes, the new and ingenious torture instruments thrown up by the Crack. All she wanted was to die – and to die now.

Life without the Playboy could hardly be considered worth living. Medea Smith had tried to lead her to a nunnery on the other side. Pierre Courvoisier had tempted her with love, and had nearly drawn her to her death. A disgusting old man from a crooked house in Cheyne Walk had made obscene gestures to her as she ran in a headlong escape from her metallic enemy. She had been threatened by rape, vicious divorce proceedings and the jaws of angry dogs on her way to the only haven she knew was secure.

And now it was gone. Ebbing-Smith's bald head would never again nod foolishly as Potts explained the latest financial crisis. Visiting Americans would no longer stroll on fine evenings along the most exciting street in the world to London's most delightful meeting-spot. Two thousand years of civilization had led to the Playboy, and now it was buried, the bodies of Brother Cornelius and the young-old playboys of the Western World lying in serried ranks beneath the ruins.

If Baba could have wept, she would have let herself go completely. But she was rolling at too great a speed – and to her surprise she found her grief decreasing as she went, as if the inability to cry detracted somehow from the sorrow. Instead, something was stirring in Baba's mind – she found she thought less and less of the tinkling piano in the bar, the Marlene Dietrich number, the pleasure of carrying frosted drinks to unappreciative men – and more and more of the future.

After all, why should she give up now?

The first thing was to find some other people. And – yes – to find out why the Crack had happened, and what was likely to happen next. It was a new feeling, and Baba couldn't put a name to it. But as she rolled her excitement grew. She just couldn't wait to see what happened to her next.

With a bump, she came to rest against a great protuberance in the ground and scrambled to her feet.

‘I think it's curiosity,' she said aloud as she examined the new feeling. ‘And where am I now, I wonder?'

The protuberance, like the cranium of some giant intellect, was round and bald and shining. Baba walked round it carefully.

A faint buzzing noise came from inside. Baba frowned. A beehive? Not quite. There was definitely something in there though. And no way in. This was a puzzle she hadn't expected, and she leant against the dome to think. Then it all became clear to her. There were people in there – walled up alive!

The buzzing grew louder, and was accompanied by a feeble tapping noise. Like trying to break a stone with a feather, Baba thought sadly. How could it be possible to penetrate something so perfectly constructed, so obdurate, so impregnable? Perhaps this was the last attempt on the part of the
prisoners to free themselves, for after a moment or so the noise stopped.

The silence that followed was dense and final, emphasized by a tricky little breeze which pulled at Baba's ears and sent scraps of week-old newspaper floating through the air. For the first time since the disaster Baba felt resignation rather than indignation or fear. So this was the end of the world: this was what it looked like. Sighing, she strolled to the summit of a small hill created by a No Entry sign and perched herself on a ledge made up out of sharp desk-tops and broken office furniture. A mound of flattened swivel chairs, already sprouting a thin moss, made a comfortable hummock, and Baba spread herself carefully on the fungoid upholstery before looking out over the ruins of London.

To the north, on the lower slopes of the great Hampstead range, the air was blue-grey from the small fires that had kindled themselves in the remains of stripped-pine kitchens. The south was flat and dead and still – even the seagulls had disappeared. Baba thought of Robinson Crusoe, and tears sprang to her eyes. She had always so much preferred the Swiss Family Robinson.

Only one thing moved. Baba watched it. With the same mixture of curiosity and resignation her eyes followed the quick, uncaring dance of the Crack as it ran like an adder in and out of the deserted streets. Sometimes it seemed to run towards her – then darted back, as if playing a mysterious version of Grandmother's Footsteps. It ran sideways, parting houses which fell groaning without each other's support. And up and down pavements – like an electric sewing machine, Baba thought, that undid stitches, tearing the material apart instead of hemming it together. With rapid pencil strokes it destroyed a hillock here, an area of parkland there. Trees fell, only to be thrown up, roots trembling violently skywards, in distant housing estates. Glass skyscrapers, their transparent stomachs filled for a moment with foliage and snapping twigs, nose-dived at the first insinuating approach of the Crack.

Baba's perch rocked but held firm. At the base, the Crack paused – then went, with a horrible decisiveness, it seemed to Baba, straight to the half-buried dome.

Baba scrambled to her feet. The dome split with a sound that was like a human cough.

From her insecure vantage point Baba peered in at its secrets. The split, she reflected with a wry smile, was like a parting cruelly drawn on a hairless head – but the teeth of the comb had sunk into the cranium itself and cut a line through the living matter of the brain.

What she saw made her draw back in disbelief. Deep down in the great skull, and gleaming like rows of sugar Easter eggs, were at least one hundred miniature crania, each one of them bald and slightly pointed. With a surge of panic Baba glanced at her own body. Had she grown suddenly to giant size, capable of taking up in one fistful all these tiny heads and rolling them like marbles in her palm? They were scholars: she could see the stacked shelves of books the height and width of postage stamps, the doll's house desks; was it possible that she, Baba, could crush all the great intellects of her time with one movement of finger and thumb, or assimilate, if she so chose, all the wisdom of the world with one sweeping gesture? Surely not, she thought miserably as she gazed down at them. Surely learning, for which she had always felt respect and reverence, was bigger and more awe-inspiring than this!

With the split in the roof the buzzing broke out anew.

A thin voice floated upwards. ‘Silence in the Reading Room. There will be penalties for further talking!'

Baba pressed her eye to the crack in the surface of the dome. Despite her respect for scholarship she found it impossible to repress a smile. The bald heads were rushing about the great room, obviously in a state of agitation. With a minuscule hammer order was finally restored. The buzzing died down and the heads gathered together again to listen to the wielder of the hammer – a head that was broader, more purple-veined than the rest.

‘There is no doubt,' began a voice that was as clear and distant as a snapping icicle, ‘that the present rift in south-east England is due to the southward movement of ice floes. I propose therefore –'

But at this a hubbub broke out. Feeble cries and the sound of fists banged on desks wafted up to the ceiling.

‘Let Ebbing-Smith speak,' a voice sounded through a microscopic megaphone. ‘He's the expert.'

I wonder if he's any relation, Baba thought wistfully as she remembered her old Playmate. But, try as she might, the tiny speck of pomposity was too far below for her to be able to detect a family resemblance.

Ebbing-Smith, who was in fact the father of the recently deceased playboy, having supported him for the past ten years on Nobel Prize money and now exhausted both financially and physically by the experience, rose with difficulty to his feet. Before speaking he glanced upwards once, his horn-rims catching the reflection of Baba's deep blue iris – then, terrified by what he had seen, he caught hold of the podium with both hands and began his speech.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen.' With a courteous bow the old Professor beamed his recognition at the distinguished lady historians, all of them engaged on biographies of past Queens. ‘I would like to put forward the theory, and substantiate it, need I add, that only the most extraordinary combination of climatic circumstances could have brought this disaster about.'

He paused for dramatic effect. It seemed to Baba that some of the reverence she had hoped for could be felt in the chamber; but at the same time she had to admit that a very faint tapping, like the sound of an army of termites, could be heard far beneath. It was probably silly to be disappointed, she tried to console herself, but surely the other scholars could listen to Ebbing-Smith with some show of manners?

‘Increased pollution,' Ebbing-Smith quavered. ‘Combined with the devilish machinations of the Americans.'

A faint halloo went up, accompanied by louder tapping from rows of identical yellow pencils, no more than wisps of straw to Baba's straining eye. Ebbing-Smith went on unperturbed.

‘In order to bring on the monsoon season in Vietnam. The combined pressure on the atmosphere has caused a depression on the earth – and, unable to sustain the volume, the earth has split in two at the conjunction of the Gulf Stream and the higher channel …'

The pencil tapping turned to desk-banging again and Ebbing-Smith's cranium sank defeated.

That sounds a likely explanation to me, Baba thought with excitement. Why ever can't the others listen to what he's saying?

A small skull, browner than the others and more sharply pointed, rose to the podium. There was a moment's expectant silence, followed by groans.

‘What about Copernicus?' the parchment cranium shouted. ‘Has it occurred to any one of us here –'

‘Simple,' came a roar from a distant desk. ‘You can forget about Copernicus and remember the Ruhr Valley. Brought by south-westerly winds the nuclear poisons of the over-industrialized zones –'

‘I think,' came the high, reproving voice of a lady scholar, ‘that we should all stop here for a moment and remember the Manicheans. We must, brothers and sisters in adversity, bear in mind the children of darkness. Temporarily, they have overcome us. Evil reigns in the world. The Almighty has sent this warning.'

The lady scholar's head, curling fronds of grey hair in strange contrast to the baldness all around her, was pulled down forcibly by its neighbours.

Baba heaved a sigh and stepped back from the busy dome. She was inclined to favour the explanation of her lost lover's father – but one glance at the sky showed that neither pollution nor American-induced rain was in evidence.

The sky was a pale thrush-egg blue, with here and there a cumulus cloud that looked as if it had been painted on by a light-hearted Tintoretto. The faint sepia tinge of the last few days had vanished completely and there was hardly a hint of moisture in the air.