A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

The fourth morning stank with the threat of rain. A laden weight pressed on the atmosphere around the theme park, bearing down on everything like drenched clothing. It was warm and cold simultaneously, and Lola found herself willing the skies to pour their load, as if that was all the world needed to do. Maybe, she thought, the sky barrelling down would be enough: a biblical flood which could wash away everything that needed to go. And that was a strangely appealing image – rainwater balling into enormous walls, cresting at their peak, sweeping through the park like collapsing sky scrapers.

She imagined them crashing through London, levelling everything. Big Ben dissolving in their wake, the business district's computers and their trillions of imaginary numbers all erased in a flash. Her new house and her old home would both be cleansed from the surface of the Earth, and whatever lived through such a storm would earn the right to start again. Only, whoever survived would have to make a better go of things. But either way, Lola knew that she would be swiftly wiped from existence; without the sheer mass of her life's worries clogging up the potted ground she imagined that the world might feel lighter. And with that thought she relaxed slightly.

She'd left the restaurant in which she and Paul had spent the night, pulling herself out through the window Paul had deftly destroyed with some freestanding item of street furniture. He was still asleep, curled around the booth next to hers, snoring into its red leather. And the previous afternoon was nothing but a series of strange blurs now. They had ridden on the park's tallest roller-coaster countless times before moving as part of a gathering group to the next, and then to the next, and then to the next. They had learned how to activate and control the rides to let Thomas and his band of followers enjoy the spoils. They rode a few more times as just the two of them, hearing nothing but their own raw screams rip through the wind and claw around the metalwork. And over the course of the day more and more people had turned up, bored of the slow apocalypse, looking for entertainment. There were more than 50 in total by the time Paul and Lola retired. They had been part of a rabble. A horde.

Eventually the remaining power had shrivelled up, and the group had disbanded to allow each individual to find their own version of continued fun. For Lola and Paul that meant finding alcohol, and subsequently raiding a supply of wine that far exceeded their needs. They had manufactured a dystopian kind of utopia, one which Lola had been happy with for a while.

Now though, under a diamond sky brimming with rain, she approached a nearby carousel with the sponge and heft of melancholy in her blood. The ride was one of the few in the park she hadn't been on during the previous day's hazy delirium, so she found herself oddly captivated by it; it was everything Victorian and hedonistic and fetishistic and fanciful that there was on Earth, all melted into one glorious whole. It was a fairy tale. Its static horses were china white across the middle, from where swirls of red, blue and yellow circled up and inwards towards their faces, each twisted into gleeful, maniacal grins. Something about it called to her. And so, before she had fully woken and come to her senses, Lola had swung two legs over the low metal fence surrounding the ride, climbed its steps and mounted one of the horses. It was frigidly cold even through the bulk of her jeans, but being astride it reminded her of a younger version of herself and that made her grin properly for the first time in a long time. The iciness of the spiralled pole, which met the roof from a welt in the horse's back and which was covered patchily in gold leaf, felt soothing against her cheek. She hung there for a while, hot face plush against cool iron, peering back at the restaurant. Paul had drank a lot more than her the night before, to the affect that he had started uttering flowery sentences and making wide gestures – ones which he had intended to be amorous and attractive but which all meant nothing in particular; she did not imagine he would be awake any time soon.