This Other Eden (26 page)

‘Yes,’
Nathan thought, ‘I am happy.’

Then,
of course, he remembered Flossie, and realised that he could not be happy
because he was unhappy. The little demons inside him re-inserted the lead
weights into the pit of his stomach and reminded him that to pretend that one
was happy when one was, in fact, unhappy was a contradiction in terms.

Pulling
herself together.

As it happened, Flossie
was thinking of Nathan. She had just had a very unpleasant experience and it
had led her to ponder her life somewhat.

For
Flossie had just lived through the day of the Rat Run. The day on which the
peoples of the world had acknowledged that normal life on Earth had finally
become unsustainable and had hence retreated to their Claustrospheres. Although
on this occasion it had not actually been the people of the world that had
acknowledged this horror, but merely the people of Great Pew, a tiny village in
Oxfordshire. A village in which Nathan and Flossie had once lived, and in which
Flossie now lived alone, her brief, post-Nathan affair having ended some time
before.

Flossie
had awoken that morning with no suspicion of the momentous events which were
about to unfold. What she had awoken with, however, was something of a
hangover. Her supper on the previous night had consisted of a bottle and a half
of red wine and an entire packet of chocolate biscuits. She was definitely
feeling a bit rough as she staggered into the kitchen, still dressed in her
night clothes… a big nightie, baggie tracksuit pants and large furry
slippers. The half-full bottle of wine stood on the kitchen table where she had
left it but Flossie resisted the temptation to take a slug, and instead made
herself a cup of tea.

The
kitchen was a bit of a mess. The kitchen was, in fact, a lot of a mess. There
was a huge pile of used tea-bags on the edge of the sink, which had some
mandarin peel in it. There were old newspapers and old tea-towels. Empty frozen
food cartons, frozen food cartons with a bit of lasagne still left in them,
frozen food cartons with a bit of lasagne and also a couple of old tea-bags,
some mandarin peel and a cigarette end in them. On the floor, beside the
bulging kitchen bin, there was a pile of pizza boxes. These would stay on the
floor for ever, because they would not fit in the bin, even had it not been
bulging. There were some mouldy crumpets and a ketchup bottle which had all its
ketchup on the outside. The floor needed sweeping and the washing-up needed
washing up.

It was
not merely because she now lived alone that Flossie was living this dissolute
existence. She had always been completely slack, domestically. But fag-ends in
the lasagne? A whole packet of choccie biccies for supper? Still in your
nightie at eleven in the morning? Flossie feared that she was becoming a touch
gross.

Sitting
down with her cuppa, Flossie decided that she really had to pull herself
together. Of course, if Nathan were still around, he would have told her that.
What is more, she would have been infuriated by his prissy attitude. She would
have told him that the world would not come to an end just because a girl did
not put her socks in the dirty clothes basket. Sometimes she had wanted to
throttle him, the way his whole body had twitched with agony if she so much as
made a ring with her coffee cup, or left the newspaper folded inside out, the
way he seemed to follow her about with a damp cloth.

Now she
felt differently, now she would have rather liked Nathan to have been around to
tell her what a state she looked. After all, it was not much fun looking a
state if there was nobody there to tell you how beautiful you were, even when
your hair was greasy. The bitter truth was that nobody was bothered whether
Flossie looked a state or not. She could scum around the house all day in
yesterday’s knickers and an old nightie and nobody would care. She could go
naked if she wished, daubed only in cold lasagne and fat scraped from the
bottom of the grill-pan. Flossie had only herself to please, and she hated it.

She
decided that she needed to inject a little dynamism into her life. She would
pull herself together. She resolved to have a bath, put on some proper clothes,
eat a proper breakfast, including fruit, and then do some work, which in her
case was dressmaking.

Just
then, just at the very moment when Flossie had definitely decided to get her life
in order, pull herself together and damn well get things sorted, the world came
to an end.

Midnight
.

The Rat Run had started.
That moment which had been talked about for so many decades, around so many
dinner-tables and on so many talk-shows had arrived. The doomsday clock which
scientists had long used to illustrate the Earth’s close proximity with
Eco-Armageddon had finally struck midnight.

Flossie
first heard about it from her radio. People still listened to the radio,
despite the numerous technical innovations which, it was regularly announced,
would supersede it. Radio, despite being well into its second century, remained
the only medium which one could enjoy whilst doing other things. At the moment
the Rat Run started, the other thing which Flossie was doing was pouring
another cup of tea. This being the first part of the process of prevaricating
by which she would put off the moment when she would begin getting her life in
order, pulling herself together and damn well getting things sorted.

The music
that had been playing on the radio suddenly stopped and a stern voice announced
an urgent newsflash, adding that all listeners should stand by for information
of the utmost importance. Momentarily Flossie was pleased. Here was
justification indeed to put off pulling herself together.

The
radio had actually told her to, and you couldn’t get a much more official
excuse than that. She sat down with her tea. Almost immediately the
announcement came and any sense of wellbeing which Flossie may have been harbouring
instantly left her. The news was truly and hugely terrible. The unthinkable had
happened. The Rat Run was beginning.

It
seemed that the mosquito infestations which had become such a familiar feature
of the British summer had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Years of
exceptionally hot and wet weather, combined with ever-expanding swamplands and
increasingly ineffective insecticides had produced breeds of mozzie with jaws
like tigers, who could suck the sap out of a tree, massive, body-building insects
who drank DDT for breakfast and which one did not so much swat as wrestle. It
used to be said that you could not get blood out of a stone, the truth was that
these terrible airborne vampires probably could.

Now it
seemed that they had decided to take over the Earth. The radio informed Flossie
that there had been a sudden and catastrophic explosion in the insect
population and that they had swarmed. Vast clouds of virtually invulnerable
blood-sucking monsters had appeared all over the Northern hemisphere. It was a
plague, similar in many ways to the plagues of locusts which crop up so
regularly in the Bible, except whereas the locusts ate only crops, these
mosquitoes ate people, a few drops at a time.

Within
an hour or so, the announcement said, the Home Counties would belong to the
insect world, soon all Britain and Europe. Therefore, it was suggested that
everyone should get inside their Claustrospheres immediately and not come out
until the following year, when the mosquitoes would have been destroyed by
their own weight of numbers.

Flossie
sat for a second as the message was repeated. She could not move, it was all
too much. One second she was thinking about having a bath, the next, it’s get
in your Claustrosphere for a year or have all the blood sucked out of your body
by billions of fist-sized mosquitoes. A siren outside in the street jolted
Flossie into action. She went to her front door and saw an army half-track
beside which stood an officer with a megaphone.

‘Get in
your Claustrospheres! Get in your Claustrospheres!’ he shouted, as soldiers in
protective suits rushed from door to door. One of them ran up the garden path
of Flossie’s little cottage.

‘Haven’t
you heard?’ the soldier shouted through his mask.

‘Yes,
but—’ Flossie responded weakly.

‘Then
get in your bloody ‘Sphere, you stupid cow! Quick! They’ll be here in an hour!
Norfolk’s black with them, carpeted from the sea to the broads.’

Flossie’s
next-door neighbour was at her door, nearly hysterical.

‘But my
husband’s at the office!’ she cried.

‘Can’t
help that, madam,’ the soldier shouted. ‘He’ll find a place in a municipal
shelter all right. It’s only a year, you can find each other then! Now get in
your Claustrosphere!’

With
that, the soldier ran on to the next house, where some of his comrades were
helping an infirm old couple.

Feeling
completely stunned, Flossie went back into her cottage, took up the half
bottle of wine and made her way into the back garden. She did not need the
booze, there were plenty of drugs and dehydro wine in the ‘Sphere, but she took
it anyway. She tried to think of something else she might like to take, but
couldn’t. What was the point? The Claustrosphere was fully equipped, that was
what it was for. The urgent commotion in the street was getting louder. Flossie
could hear it even standing in the back garden.

‘This
is the last warning,’ the commotion said. ‘This environment will be lethal in
approximately fifty-five minutes!’

Dressed
in her nightie and slippers Flossie went inside the Claustrosphere and closed
the BioLock.

The
black hole of Great Pew.

The geodesic shell of
Flossie’s Claustrosphere was non-transparent. All Claustrospheres were like
that, the reason being that the outer surface of the dome was its energy
source. Sunlight so dangerous that it could kill people was still a valuable
source of solar power, and it was this solar fuel which made the BioCycle
viable. There were not even any windows. So delicate were the ecological
rhythms of existence within the dome, it was thought that the intrusion of a
natural light cycle might imbalance the process. Besides which, no transparent
material had yet been developed which could be guaranteed to filter all the
harmful elements of naked sunlight. Many Claustrosphere psychologists argued
that windows would be a bad thing anyway. They felt that, to the occupant,
their Claustrosphere
was
their world and to be able to look out at
another might lead to them denying their new reality and failing to come to
terms with their own world.

Therefore,
once inside, Flossie was completely alone. Claustrospheres had no phones. The
very fact of BioSphere technology was based on the presumption that all life
outside was over. Therefore, any factor which required maintenance, power or
organisation from outside the Claustrosphere was, by its very nature,
untenable. Some richer people had invested in expensive radio and solid state
land-line networks between small groups of friends, but any intrusion into the
structure of the geodesic shell was frowned upon by the manufacturers. The
whole principle worked on complete enclosure. A world apart. They refused to
guarantee shelters in which the dome had been punctured. ‘Once you’re in,
you’re in’ was the cheerful slogan employed by the companies marketing the
numerous Claustrosphere accessories that ranged from Virtual Reality sex-suits
to worry beads. Flossie was in.

Now she
knew how much she missed Nathan. She missed him, to coin a phrase, with all her
heart. In fact, with all her heart and all of the rest of her body. She shook
with how much she missed him. She wept and she wept. She was weeping when she
realised that a light was flashing and a recorded voice was speaking to her.

‘Please
activate LifeCycle immediately, please activate Life-Cycle immediately.’

Flossie
knew what that meant. She had to start the damn thing up. Claustrospheres
produced their own oxygen and if the occupant did not start the generation
process within approximately half an hour of closing the BioLock, the available
natural oxygen would be exhausted and the occupant would suffocate.

Flossie
seriously thought about ignoring the warning. Why not? She was alone in a
Claustrosphere! Alone, without Nathan, in the Claustrosphere that they had
built together after endless debate and hand-wringing. True, it was only for a
year, but a year alone in a Claustrosphere? Could she hack it? She looked
around at the big TV screen and the miniature rain forest which would be her
only companions. She could not even turn the lights off because she and Nathan
had decided that they couldn’t afford a night-time cycle.

It was
the thought of Nathan that made her turn on the LifeCycle. If she loved him,
and she knew now that she did, she could wait a year. Where was he, she
wondered? In America; that was in the Northern Hemisphere, wasn’t it? Of
course, it was. Would he make it into a Claustrosphere? He had faxed her a
message to say that Plastic Tolstoy himself had rented him a house off Sunset.
It would have a Claustrosphere, surely? Of course it would. There was not a
house in the US without one. Flossie tried to think of Nathan, sitting in some
American Claustrosphere. She wondered if he was alone. She hoped not, for his
sake. Flossie found her own solitary prospects rather daunting. On the other
hand, she rather hoped there wouldn’t be any women with him. It could happen,
if he had been forced to retreat into an LA municipal. He was a man with a
development deal, possibly about to spend a year amongst secretaries,
waitresses and wannabe actresses. Flossie decided not to think about it.