Fiction

Home Soon

Winner of the 2014 Booker Prize Foundation Universities Initiative Short Story Prize

I was on the train the day of the bombs. Six hours waiting on the platform at St. Pancras, after a meeting I hadn't wanted to go to, for a job I didn't even like. Trains cancelled and delayed with no explanation; just text on a public announcement screen. Waiting on the draughty platform. Reading the notices about the need for the correct travel documentation and why you shouldn't leave your luggage unattended over and over again to pass the time; a crowd of other travellers restive around me. I suppose we all just wanted to get home. Then the tension electric when a train finally pulled in and the scramble to get on board. Doors closing too soon; a woman screaming on the platform. Falling into a miraculously empty seat and inadvertently meeting the glance of the woman opposite; blonde hair, startlingly green eyes replete with anguish. Her coloured contact lenses cannot veil her fear. Tapping out the text message to my husband: ‘Made it. Train really late. Home soon. x.’ Thinking about my husband as the train rattled north; about how I'd left him asleep in bed that morning.
It had still been dark, it had been so early. There had been a gap in the curtains and a band of orange from the street light outside had fallen across the duvet over his legs. How I hadn't wanted to go. How I was going to leave that job and stop having to make this journey for these pointless meetings once a week. How I should have resigned a long time ago now. How I'd left the children sleeping in their beds; how I should never have left them. A savage, almost visceral longing to be home, away from these strangers and off this train overriding all other senses. Then the train slowing, slowing before limping to a halt. A man with ragged black hair leaning over me, demanding, ‘what station? Where are we?’ Where are we? A quick glance out the window revealing nothing, a field. Could be anywhere. Nowhere. Then the boom in the distance; a tremor in the earth, the rattle of the windows. Where are we? Nowhere. With no place to go.
Why wait on the train after that? I suppose we didn't know what else to do. We could all see the darkening skyline. We all knew what it meant, and yet we didn't move. We were waiting for … what? A conductor? A guard? Someone to check our travel documentation? Someone to tell us what to do next, now that everything we'd ever known was gone. Then someone did come. A soldier with a gun and a mask covering his face, herding us out into the field beside the tracks, like the sheep we were.
Then there were a lot of soldiers, using their rifles to prise open the doors to the train. The driver at the end of the train, expostulating with a soldier, gesticulating towards his train. The soldier raising his gun. A crack resounding in the air. The driver crumpling to his knees and bowing over before the soldier, his head resting upon the ground, as if overcome with melancholy. The man with the ragged black hair, leaning over me again and muttering into my ear, ‘just do what they say.’ Glancing up at him in surprise. It had never occurred to me not to.
Another soldier, this one with a red beret on and an air of importance; handing out masks and ordering us to put them on. Fumbling with it, almost gagging as it snapped around my face with the smell of burning rubber; too much like the Lapsang souchong tea the Director drank in the office. Being pushed inside a canvas-covered wagon and driven away. ‘Where? Where to?’ the man beside me is crooning to himself, rocking a little in his seat as if to comfort himself. I remember rocking the children when they were babies; the thought dances ruinously across my mind. Cradling their tiny backs with my hand, holding them close against my shoulder, joggling them up and down, up and down through the long nights when they wouldn't settle. The street light outside shining through the curtains into the nursery with a weak orange glow. Those nights when they had colic and cried all night and it felt as if I was the only person awake in the whole wide world. It doesn't matter where we're going. It's where we're not going that matters. We're not going home.

They take us to a centre. The centre is very clean and very white inside. The word pristine springs to mind. The army truck drives down a long dark tunnel to get to the light white centre. It is underground. They do not let us in until we have been decontaminated. It is not a pleasant process, but it cannot be helped. They do not want us to get dirt into their clean white centre, like so many children's fingerprints on glass, or crayon marks on a wall. When we do eventually get inside, we discover the centre is a warren of winding tunnels and seemingly infinite rooms, like some vast country house constructed underground. There will be servants' quarters. There are always servants' quarters in country houses, with walls painted yellow, perhaps, to differentiate the servants' sections from those of the flawless white masters'. They used to stain the paint with urine. It is only a matter of time before they get the measure of me, and send me to the servants' quarters.

‘This is the end,’ they tell us. And then they add, ‘but not the end.’
Make up your mind, I think.
‘You are lucky,’ they tell us. ‘Lucky we found you out there on that train. Lucky you got out of London when you did. Lucky the train made it so close to the shelter. Not many are so lucky. So many are dead. Not just in London, but everywhere.’
Like the train driver, I think. Or my children.
‘So many are dead, their bodies consumed by the fire or the ash. Or if they are not dead now, they will be soon. Dying of their injuries, or the diseases which will inevitably come.’ No one will clear up their corpses. They will be left like so much rubbish to rot in the streets. Their bodies will crumple into themselves until they are as light as paper; blown around by the winds, perhaps they will catch on barbed wire fences like rags and shreds of plastic bags. So much refuse left behind.

‘You are lucky,’ Dr Gerhardt tells us. ‘This is the end of the human race as it was, and yet, just the beginning. Humanity can start again.’ Dr Gerhardt's coat is as white as the walls and the floors. He knows how to make a new human race. This one will be better, he tells us. He's going to improve us; out of what's left he'll create something new. The next step in the evolutionary chain. He's going to plant this new human race in his test tubes and grow them in his laboratory. The first of them will grow up underground; of necessity, he tells us. The world outside is ruins and ashes, but one day, in the future, there will be sunlight again. He needs just a few pieces of all of us; the ones that remain. Just a few cells. There is a questionnaire, to find out what we are good at. He would be grateful if we could complete it. Then he will be pleased to examine us. He would like to see what features we have, ones to pass on which would be good for this new human race. I look around the assembled group. We are a mixture of soldiers, train passengers and a few other stragglers. Even though we are all clean and hosed and dressed in white, we are a shambolic bunch. I have my doubts.

‘How do we know what's left outside?’ the man with the ragged black hair demands. He has become belligerent as the days have passed. He is not taking his own advice; he is not just doing as they say. He wants to go home too. Dr Gerhardt blinks myopically at the man; analysing him from a distance. Nothing worth keeping there. The doctor nods infinitesimally at one of the guards who leads the man struggling away. Perhaps he will get to go home now, the man with the ragged black hair. Or perhaps, and more likely, like the train driver, he will soon be overcome with melancholy too. I think about the sunlight that these new humans will see, when the world is as clean as the centre.
We will not get to see this sunlight. Sunlight shining through autumn leaves. Spring sunlight when the world seems fresh and newborn and green. Summer sunlight, parching the garden and making the roses blowsy. I don't miss the sunlight all that much. I miss the streetlight outside my house, shining like an orange beacon in the dark. How the sodium glow lit patterns in the pavement; they would spiral up to meet you as you walked. The certain knowledge that the dark house beyond was home, that everyone inside it was what mattered most.
Are my children really dead? Is my husband? I left him sleeping. Perhaps I think these thoughts a thousand times a day. Some days I don't think at all. It is better not to think. Dickens' Rachael shuffles into my mind, a bundle of Victorian shawls and skirts: ‘Try to think not; and 'twill seem better.’ It is good advice. I try not to think and things seem better. Poor Rachael working at her loom in the vast mechanised industrial north. It was a brave new world then too. Machines which could do the work of twenty men.
Look where they have brought us, these machines. Now we are weaving new life from the fabric of our DNA, or Dr Gerhardt is. I am not weaving anything. I am cleaning a kitchen surface. And then I am wiping tables; or emptying bins.
‘We all must contribute,’ Dr Gerhardt says.
‘You must do what you can.’
He does not say what happens to those who don't; or those who can't. The trouble with my contribution is that the wiping of tables and emptying of bins gives one too much time to think. It is a mindless occupation, cleaning. It is hard to follow Rachael's advice.

Dr Gerhardt doesn't want us to think too much either. ‘What is there to reflect upon in the past?’ he demands. ‘Too many mistakes in the past. It's not good to be too sentimental.’ So let's leave the past alone. The past is a foreign country to us now. Nostalgia is the original sin in our brave new world. We need to celebrate the future; of course we do. Celebrate the first produce from the laboratory. The new children containing bits and pieces of us all and some added magic from Dr Gerhardt's own recipe. Strange new children, with eyes of startling green. Not coloured contact lenses after all, then. Their skin isn't like baby's skin. It's soft, granted; but it's slippery too. No clammy handprints here.

Dr Gerhardt is determined to keep the new world clean. These children almost rustle as they move. Sleek, green eyed children, who grow too fast. They don't stay babies for long. Within a couple of days they are toddling. A week and they have a knowing look in their eyes, as if they know more than us. They stand in groups and observe us. We are an anachronism already. They almost reach to my shoulder, like my eldest son on his eleventh birthday. He was almost taller than me then. Tall and skinny, bony elbows and knees; long legs he didn't quite know what to do with. Awkward like a newborn foal. Curled up in his bed when I left that morning. He would have got up and gone to school; and then … Well, I'll never know now. If I'd known, I would have kissed his sleeping head as I'd left. If I'd known, I'd never have left at all. One of them sidles up to me as I'm wiping over the tables in their quarters. He holds something black in his hand.
‘Who is “x”?’
I stop wiping tables and bend down to him, suppressing a shudder as I do so. I cannot help it, even though it is just a child. This child is not like my eldest son.
‘What's that?’ I ask. He has my mobile phone. The screen is open on the sent messages. Made it. Train really late. Home soon. x.
‘I'm surprised that still works.’ I laugh a little, and then stop. It sounds too much like choking.
‘Did you find a charger for it?’
‘Who is “x”?’ the child demands again. They are nothing if not utilitarian. They are Gradgrind and Bounderby. They want facts.

‘I am.’ I smile and force myself to stroke the child's ragged black hair. Perhaps there was something worth keeping after all. ‘I am x. The last letters in the alphabet. The last of us.’

The child smiles and nods as if this makes sense, as if I have given the correct answer. When he smiles he seems more human. More like my son. He moves closer to me still, and this time it doesn't seem so strange.

‘Tell me about the old world,’ the child insists.
I put my cleaning cloth down and sit down at the table I have been wiping. He sits down beside me.
‘I was on the train,’ I say, ‘the day of the bombs.’

Val Derbyshire