A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 9

Part III:

Three Days Left

CHAPTER 9

On the morning of the third day most of London was in a frenzy. Destructive pockets of crime and fire, pillaging and looting, death and brutality in all its horrific forms had begun to spread outwards from the centre like the multiplying cells of a virus. Those who wanted only to die with their loved ones had either found an uncertain fate further outside the city, or had begun to do so in their own homes, ensuring that the only people still pacing the paths were those with intentions of emptying their inhibitions fully and wholly into London's veins. Lifeless bodies littered the streets. The husks of beings clinging halfway between life and the thereafter chose arbitrary spots of pavement on which to live out their last moments on Earth. There were very few cars still in operation now; very few things with an engine would move, or could get very far given the chance. It made for an odd silence, but one which only served to amplify the many screams.

Paul Everett didn't know any of this, though, because he had died. He found himself lying face up in a rumbling, dark and featureless purgatory, its long growl deafening him. He was left with little choice but to reason that he had met his end in the fervent cold of the night, huddled under a tunnel in the wooded depths of a footpath. He had made it to the age of 80, but he had not made it to the end of days. He stretched his right arm out and splayed the fingers across what he found to be a solid coldness. All he could register was the noise. There was noise and discomfort and nought else.

A while passed and no god or angelic spectre relieved him of his wait. But then, he thought. But then, as an agnostic, perhaps this was the best he could expect? His body vibrated painfully against the floor of the black void for what he reckoned were years, and he laughed at the absurdity of it, then he felt hot tears across his cheeks, and he wondered what kind of afterlife would make his bones ache in such a violent way. In the end he was forced to try and steal his mind from the plane of nothingness beneath him and put it to work piecing what memories he had of himself into a manageable order. He wanted to prepare responses, should he find himself being judged on them.

He could remember only small instances of being a boy, of growing up an only child in a large house in Cambridgeshire. He remembered one summer in which he had fallen from a window and spent a few weeks in hospital. He could still smell the floors there – could still hear his mother's stinging words about his accident-prone nature. She had said that he would cause her no end of worry. Then she was suddenly older, and she was telling him about Southeast Asia, and its dangers, and its extreme weather, and how he should just find a job and a wife and effectively push on with the drudgery of it all like everyone else.

And then, of course, there was Lola. Nothing but Lola for years and decades, right in the centre of things. There was a wedding and a succession of houses. There were nights of warm sex and cold fighting, of torrid arguments about nothing he could grasp now, and a ridiculous kind of love so dense that it pulled the walls into it. He remembered a lustful dance and a yearning to be near her that hurt his blood. He remembered her friendship. But the images in his memories were mostly dull: blunt. Everything was in a soft focus, the details wrong. If he tried to remember how she looked when he had first kissed her she would appear just as she did in her mid-forties. If he imagined the contours and lines on her face from when he last saw her she would look young and beautiful instead. His memories had been falling out of sync for years, but their decline into obscurity now scared him; he could scarcely draw her image behind his eyes anymore.

Then, in sync with a monumental shift in the surface beneath him, everything jumped forwards to the last time they had spoken. He then worried that this might be it: the big 'It', in its entirety. Perhaps this blind realm wasn't his purgatory but the afterlife in earnest. He reasoned, in light of the evidence around him, that the heaven which humans had always dreamed of was nothing but a dark void – a featureless blackness – each one built purposefully for a single consciousness to exist in, alone forever. Like fireflies kept in separate jars. He remembered Lola once telling him about something she called 'String Theory', and how all there is in the world was forged from pure energy. She had been in a small café with him, sipping tea. They were young then, and the light was orange. Something had been in the newspaper about a scientific theory Paul couldn't comprehend – one which explained away all the world's mysteries. It laid the blame with tiny, vibrating bits of elastic. He recalled not understanding and Lola simplifying things. It was a gift she had. It was why she had found such success in teaching.