Introduction to the Boxset
A story
It was Tuesday, and everybody was dead. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody. Mum, dad, my big brother Damien and Beardsley the dog, and the neighbours. On television, an unflinching camera showed the slumped corpse of the newsreader. Outside, the birds littered the streets, beside foxes and cats and cars that had come to rest on curb sides or collided with other cars or lorries, their already dead-drivers pulling at their seat belts in heavy slouches. It was sick. Dead sick.
I just went fuuuuuuuuuuck. And repeatedly ‘fuck, fuck fuck, fuck’ over and over like Hugh Grant at the beginning of Four Weddings and a Funeral. Though this would have been called No Wedding and 6 billion Funerals. Lolz.
I mean I didn’t even have time to be upset properly. I mean I was upset when I found mum and dad obvs. But then I found Damien and then I found Beardsley and it was like ‘fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck’. And then I was like how many people have died? And there was no way of knowing. So, like a spaz, I’m trying all the numbers on my phone and they’re going to voicemail – voicemail – voicemail. No one replies on any of the WhatsApp groups – Facebook nothing – Instagram zip. And no one’s active. Nothing is pinging, no one is liking, sharing, whatevering. And I can’t think of anything to do. What is there to do?
I take my bike and I go into town and there’s no traffic or nothing. Just dead. Some people lying face down on the pavement where they fell, puddles of blood from broken noses, but mostly its closed doors and closed curtains. Everyone was alive at two-ish because I was still sending Jessie a message and she was coming back to me. I reckon must have been about three o’clock in the morning. Something like that. Most everyone would be in bed and they all died.
It didn’t look like it hurt. Mum and dad looked peaceful enough. Damien looked like he was still asleep but there’s something about a dead body that is just dead. You just know it’s dead. There’s no mistaking it. Quietness I suppose. No droning snoring, no breathing, no movement at all. Spooky. And the same was true outside. No birds, no slinky cats, no barking dogs, no sound of traffic. Just the rattle of dry leaves on the pavement as the wind brushed them aside. Like it was going “fuck it.”
I headed for somewhere crowded. Somewhere there must be people. Trafalgar Square. Nobody. A group of dead homeless people by Charring Cross looking like always. A dead policeman. Some dead taxi drivers. A dead night-bus. A dead all-night pharmacist. A group of late-night revellers dead in the middle of the pavement like a puddle of sick. Ringed by dropped kebabs.
I rode down to the Houses of Parliament. I’d been there on a school trip last year and so I went past the dead night watchman and wandered around inside. There were some dead cleaners but the doors were locked to most of the rooms and offices. And I shouted and banged until I got freaked out by my own fucking echo.
I went back home. Even as I approached, there was a bit of me that got my hopes up. Even with it being so quiet, the road was still my street so it was easy to kid myself for a second that I’d get in and my dad would boom ‘where the bloody hell have you been?’ and mum would start in on him ‘don’t you shout at her’ and Beardsley barking and adding to the row and all a happy madness, thinking I hated it but not knowing how much I’d missed once everyone I ever knew was dead.
But the house was as silent as the grave. Mrs Blackshaw would write ‘cliché’ beside that if I did it for my composition. Not anymore, I thought and as I did, thinking of Mrs Blackshaw, who was a royal pain in the vagina, thinking of her being dead and all made me really breakdown. Daft, isn’t it?
I just balled. Inconsolable. And I was starving so I had some lunch and then slept all afternoon. Then I played video games and then I started thinking about the night to come and how I had bodies in the house. I didn’t fancy digging a bunch of graves, but I didn’t know what to do. They were going to start stinking in a bit. It began raining so I didn’t want to go out again. I watched a DVD of Absolutely Fabulous and then went to bed. I was in a state of shock. I couldn’t even open the door to go in and look at my mum and dad.
The next morning, I decided that rather than digging graves and all that, I’d be better off just looking for somewhere else to live. I packed up my stuff in the car. I didn’t really know how to drive but I’d learned something important from videogames which was that if you do something over and over again you get the knack of it. Plus, there was no traffic. I read on the internet the basics about changing gears and what pedal did what and everything. Then I reversed into the road, the engine choking already, but never mind. I tried again and soon I was driving slowly down the middle of the road. By the time I got to the shopping centre I knew I was all right and was beginning to go a bit quicker, then I almost piled into the barrier that was down at the carpark.
Shopping centres and places like that wouldn’t have any bodies in them to stink the place up but they always were tricky to get into without setting off alarms which would blare and freak me out and then just get on my fucking tits. It took me three goes before I managed to get into an IKEA without setting the alarm off. The bedroom was already good but I dragged stuff in from other parts of the store. I went foraging for food. The electricity was still working but I didn’t know how long that would take before it went off.
Getting around wasn’t difficult. If it was dry, I would use my new Vespa, otherwise I’d use the car. I could eat whatever I liked, but soon everywhere was beginning to smell. All the rodents had died as well and there was a massive accumulative smell that was just building up and drifting everywhere. It got to a point that I was really hoping it would rain. A big massive storm and a blowing wind would be tops. Or a fire.
I went to like the National Gallery and walked around. And I liked the parks, though the ducks and swans floating in the lakes and ponds, nodding aside the dead fish, put a bit of a downer on it. Television wasn’t working anymore and after a week the electricity went.
I was like… fuck. Food was going to be a problem in a while. And there was no one to talk to about my problems. No one at all. Everybody was dead. To get over the feelings, I’d wake up in the morning and think of somewhere to go. I’d find it on my A-to-Z and then I’d set off. I’d go to the Museum, or window shopping – when I found something I wanted, I broke the window and took it – or I’d go on the Thames in a boat and go up and down. But the problem was I had nowhere that I really wanted to go. I even found myself driving past my old school as if that was something I wanted to do. Go in and sit at my desk and look out of my window. I began to get really lonely and really, but really bored.
The surprising thing is I didn’t feel much like grief, but I missed people and I missed my friends. There was just no one around and that made me really wonder about who I was. I started to go a bit off my head. I knew I had to keep busy. It must have been a week and a half after everyone had died – I was beginning to lose sense of what day it was like it was a long holiday – when I decided to go to Buckingham Palace. The Royal Family were all dead and the Queen obvs. All the staff would be dead but when I got there, I couldn’t smell anything. Everywhere else had a bad fruit smell, but not here. In fact, it smelled all right. Like shampooed carpets and furniture polish.
I walked through the tall rooms and I didn’t mean to be sniffy but I couldn’t help but think the furnishings and the paintings and what not was all a bit naff. It all seemed so old fashioned and out of date. Like a really posh hotel I didn’t want to stay in. I was walking through one of the long galleries when I heard a noise. It was as if I had gone deaf for days. The only sounds I could hear usually was the wind and the rain, if there was rain. Other than that, I heard my own breathing and the sounds I made when I did stuff.
But there was this sound. First off, I thought it must be the wind blowing in at an open window and banging something. A thud – thud – thud. But then I realized no. Those were footsteps. And they were walking right above my head. I suppose I might have thought about it being someone dangerous, a psycho serial killer or something but I didn’t care. I really didn’t. I’d have given Jimmy Saville a hug. All I wanted was to hear a voice that wasn’t my own, here ideas that I hadn’t just had, see a face. Or if it wasn’t a person, if it was a cat or a dog that’d be okay too. Not as good but okay. This is all to say I legged it as fast as I could to a door and found a staircase and yelling ‘hey-hey-hey!’ I ran towards the sound. I almost ran into her. And I was gobsmacked.
‘Fucking hell!’ I said. ‘It’s you!’
‘Yes,’ she said, calmly. ‘It is.’
I’d seen her on television a hundred times, it seemed and it felt weird not because it was her but because she didn’t seem to recognise me. When you’ve seen someone so much, you just assume they must have seen you too but she didn’t have a clue who I was. When you think about it, that’s obvious but still it felt really weird.
‘You’re the Prime Minister,’ I said.
‘Was the Prime Minister.’
‘What?’ forgetting my manners. I could hear my mum screaming in my head – say ‘pardon’. ‘I mean pardon.’
‘To be the Prime Minister there have to be other ministers. And there aren’t anymore. Nor is there a Her Majesty for whom I have to head the government.’
‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it. I thought everybody was dead.’
‘Everybody is dead,’ she said, calm as you like. ‘Except for you. And the dolphins. And the giraffes.’
‘Thank god for that,’ I said.
It was meant to be sarcastic, but I don’t think she got it. She smiled and nodded. Everyone thought it was a little mental the way people and governments had started to conserve the dolphins and the giraffes. Not just conserve them but promote and see to it that after a bit they were thriving. Poaching had become a capital crime and you weren’t allowed to eat tuna in case the dolphins got caught in the nets. That had all been the Prime Minister’s policy and everyone had gone along with it because they were very happy with the way she had sorted out the other problems in the world and people talked about her like she was a mix of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa wrapped up into one power suit.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I’m so… it’s so weird.’
‘It’s bigger than Downing Street,’ Sally Bowers said. ‘That place is way too pokey. I mean it’s just a bloody house. And as I’m going to have to wait around a while, I thought I might as well do it in comfort.’
‘Do you know what happened?’ I said.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. Then she clapped her hands, ‘Let’s have some tea.’
She took me to her room. It was beautiful. She had fitted up several big screen televisions. They were showing nature documentaries. ‘The generators here run off diesel and I’ve got plenty,’ she explained as she boiled the water. ‘I’m afraid it will have to be black. The milk is no longer to be trusted.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said.
We drank tea and she told me that everybody in the world was dead. China, Brazil, the United States, Russia, France, Italy, the whole of Europe and Africa and all the rest of the world, even little islands where no one even knew people were living. Even scientists studying the South pole in Antarctica were now frozen corpses listening to the arctic winds. Even remote tribes in the Amazon no one had ever seen. ‘They won’t see them at all now, because they’re all dead.’
‘Shit,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said brightly and then put on a serious face. ‘Yes, it was terrible.’
‘Why did everybody die?’
She blew air out of her mouth and shrugged. ‘Extermination,’ she said, sipping her tea and wincing slightly. ‘I miss lattes.’
She asked about me, where I went to school and lived and what my parents did and I had the feeling that she was asking questions the way she might when she visited a toilet factory or a primary school in an official capacity. I had been feeling so lonely but all of a sudden, I wanted to get away from this strange woman. A fucking weirdo. And it struck me for a moment that she might be totally cracked, obsessed with her animals and living in a palace. It seemed to be mutual because after I finished my tea, she offered me a biscuit three times, each time a bit more aggressively, so I said, ‘I have to go.’
And she said, ‘Oh what a pity! Do come and see me again.’
I didn’t. I decided that I had to get out of London. The stink was so great it was unavoidable. I wanted to go to the sea and as I’d never been, I decided to go to Cornwall. That first year I read a lot of books. With the electricity out, it was the only way to get other voices into my head. I drove to Lands End and then up to Scotland. Moving helped a lot. It gave me an illusion of something happening, but the vehicles were in worse nick as time went on and the fuel began to fail. I’m not sure if it has a sell by date but it wasn’t working anymore and I found myself cycling more and more. I didn’t mind if the weather was nice and I became very fit. Though why I would need to be fit was beyond me. I listened to audio books that I found on CDs and cassettes. I had found a Walkman and a Discman and I always had plenty of AAA batteries. The internet didn’t work anymore.
It must have been four or five years down the line but I began to want to see more of the world. I could go through the Channel Tunnel and make it to the continent. Before I left, I wondered if Sally was still be alive and decided to visit her. I’d grown up a lot since I saw her last and I had had a lot of time to think over what she had said. I had thought over it again and again. It struck me in retrospect that she had been behaving very suspiciously. Could it be that she was in some way responsible for what had happened? The thing about the dolphins and giraffes had always been a bit mad, but what if it wasn’t madness but something else? Don’t ask me what. I honestly couldn’t tell you.
There was a good chance she wouldn’t be in Buckingham Palace or that she might even have died. I was half prepared to find her hanging from one of the fancy chandeliers. London didn’t smell bad anymore.
The rot had got to that stage that everyone had dried out and become dusty rather than squishy. I’d been to plenty of other cities in England since I’d been on my travels so I was quite prepared for London being more or less overgrown and so it proved. I could still cycle the roads but cracks had buckled them as weeds grew and moss and mould and roots from trees pushed at the unresisting tarmac. Things had been beaten and broken by the weather and the cracks had been torn and widened. It was weird to see how quickly the world took over when people weren’t around to pick up and mend.
Giraffes were grazing on the trees in Green Park and I saw Sally Bowers standing at the window of the palace looking down as I swerved and cycled my way across the courtyard.
‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,’ she said. ‘You’ve grown.’
‘Have I?’ I said. I was happy to see her.
‘Tea?’ she asked.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
Her room was the same as it had been. I would have sworn she was crazy but she was exactly the same as she had been before. Nothing about her manner or her hair had changed. She smiled with the pleasure of someone who only wanted to see you for about thirty minutes. I told her about my journeys.
‘Where are you going next?’ she asked.
‘France,’ I said. ‘I want to see Europe.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘No one else is alive anywhere,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
‘I did it.’
‘You… did this? You killed everybody?’
‘Obviously not everybody. You’re alive. It’s in the protocol. A safety measure. One female and one male must be preserved for reproduction and possible records. Don’t worry, we’ll gather you up when the fleet arrives. It ought to be here any year now.’
‘This is crazy.’
‘I know, I mean no one ever does anything with the species. They just go into storage and then a few centuries later someone will hit the wrong button accidentally and zam! They’ll be gone too. But there are these protocols built in. If you were to drown yourself or something, you would actually be saving me quite a lot of paperwork.’
‘But I don’t want to die,’ I said.
‘No?’ she looked mystified. ‘Why not?’
‘I like being alive.’
She shook her head, marvelling. ‘Okay. It’s up to you. I guess I’ll have plenty time on the way back.’
Everything I did had to be planned. Before going through the tunnel, I had to make sure I had enough lights and enough batteries for those lights. I was always thinking of what could go wrong, but as it happened, though the walk was dark and hard I wasn’t plunged into a nightmare scenario. A train of mummified corpses was lodged halfway through but I used the emergency pathway to bypass it and carry on my way.
I could give you a travelogue here of everywhere I went but it wouldn’t interest you and, in the end, it began not to interest me. I saw things that were beautiful and weird. I saw more things than I’d ever thought I’d see but there was no one to tell them to, unless of course I returned to Sally or if I found the one other survivor who according to Sally should be somewhere. I also thought about her story of killing everyone. I had dismissed it at first because I thought she was cuckoo. Her lack of hysteria, her calm, I now read as proof of her craziness. It was easier to diagnose when she wasn’t actually in front of me, utterly convinced of her own sanity and throwing mine into question.
I was in Gibraltar contemplating the short distance to Africa, but it occurred to me I didn’t want to go any farther. There was no point and the dangers would increase. I had taught myself what wild fruits and vegetables I could find and eat. I knew the basic layout of towns and could find stores and shops which still held edible food. There were no animals to hunt or fish to catch or birds to snare. The weather and the climate were liveable. In Africa, I would be faced by new worries and dangers. It was time I went home.
That night while I was asleep, I was taken. I woke up in a clean white cell with a large window on the floor showing waves crashing distantly below as we drifted about a mile above the Earth. A metallic voice through the speakers informed me that I had been taken on board the SPD Krull from the planetary system of Zarodz. I was not to be harmed. I would be provided with all I needed and protected. I would even have the opportunity to breed and continue the existence of my species, if I wanted.
‘No pressure,’ the voice said and then clicked off.
I would later learn that the click was actually a word of the untranslated Zarodzioan language. We picked up Sally Bowers from London and there was something like a party. All the Zardozis went out like timid tourists, recording everything they saw. They played music and gave speeches and I had to stand on a platform while they stared at me and maybe the horrible clicking and chattering noise that I would eventually have to learn. Sally Bowers herself dropped to the floor – halfway through what I took to be an award ceremony – and her lifeless husk quickly melted into the pavement and then Sally Bowers as she actually was came out of one of the tall cylinders. She was originally called Phil, I learned, but she stuck to Sally Bowers because that had become a thing now apparently.
The Zardozis are hard to describe and there’s no real point describing them. Anyone who would need to have known is dead and can’t read this and everyone alive who will read this is a Zardozis. But I also know that you guys are so narcissistic that you’re always asking me, ‘What did you first think of us? When did you first suspect Sally Bowers? Didn’t you read any of the conspiracy stuff about her being an alien?’
Clickety-clickety fucking click.
The conspiracy stuff had been on YouTube from the moment Sally Bowers became Prime Minister and had those years where she solved everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to bringing democracy back to the United States. It turns out that the videos were actually being manufactured and beamed to Earth from Zarodz as basically a joke to wind up Sally Bowers.
Anyway, when I first saw the ‘aliens’ in their true form, I was not overwhelmed or freaked out. They just looked like two-legged giraffes. Two -legged giraffes who sounded like dolphins. Mystery solved. They set about rounding up the giraffes and dolphins to take home. It turned out the dolphins spoke a language which shared a sonic alphabet with the Zardozis.
The next order of business was to find the other human survivor – my mate.
‘Are you excited?’ the voice mechanically gibbered. ‘No pressure.’ They repeated ‘no pressure’ so often I began to feel that there was in fact a lot of fucking pressure.
They put on another ceremony. This time we were in China, where given population and what not, I should have probably guessed. They wheeled out the platform and the music and the Zardozis wandered about the Forbidden City and complained about the lack of giraffes. Finally, they wheeled out my mate who turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy. He was feral and dirty and refused to speak for a week. I cleaned him up as best I could and to be honest it felt good to have another face and eyes in front of me, someone to take care of, even though the Zardozis wouldn’t listen to my explanation about age and every time I made some gesture towards Jia the speaker would crackle on and a voice would coo: ‘Go on give him a kiss.’
They were so clueless they didn’t even think to tell me we were leaving Earth. I just woke up one ‘morning’ and the stars were shining through the floor. We weren’t allowed to move from the cell. We got injections that gave us all the sustenance we needed and produced no waste, so we stopped pooing and weeing. This felt very strange but after a while I was so used to it that years later when they gave me some proper food for a documentary they were making, the whole procedure struck me as disgusting and humiliating.
Jia learned English and I learned Cantonese, though Jia had been so young when everyone had died that his vocabulary was pretty limited. I thought the space ship would have a computer with all the languages in the world, but it turned out the only thing they had was a translator and they had no educational materials as such. They hadn’t saved any literature or art from the Earth just a bunch of dolphins and giraffes. When I shouted at them about this, they told me it would be okay because I would remember it. Never had I felt so guilty for not listening to Mrs. Blackshaw. I didn’t remember any of the Shakespeare we had read, and I hadn’t read much anyhow. All the music I had in my head were stupid advertising jingles and some songs mixed in. My Walkman and Discman had been left in Gibraltar. But I couldn’t even begin to sing them all the way through. Years of wandering around and looking at dead towns and cities, standing on empty beaches and looking out at fishless seas had also had a hand in getting rid of my memory.
I cried when I thought about it and Jia came over and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Ooooh, it’s happening,’ a voice cried from the speakers.
We became very good friends and by the time we got to Zarodz I was in my late twenties and he was in his late teens, so we ended up getting together and doing our best to ignore the noises of our audience. After we’d done it, a couple of times, they got bored. They’d been expecting something really weird and I guess it must have been for them at first but soon enough it was only as weird as anything else and it lost entertainment value. I’d sussed that for the Zardozis, it was all about entertainment. They didn’t care about power or military might, or science and discovery. They just wanted new things to do to pass the time. But the new things they wanted were always things that resembled them because of aforementioned narcissism. Anything too novel they ended up not even able to see it properly. And so, because the things they liked were the things most like them, then there were a narrow and limited number. They were doomed to always be only thirty seconds from boredom and a desperate need to alleviate it. In a sense, we were quite similar and me and Jia were a hit for this reason, though a short-lived one.
The documentary has an element of nostalgia to it. Sally Bowers gives a long interview and there’s new footage of the pooing – they’re much more interested in this than the eating – and the sex and the twins Barack and Confucius. The documentary was a big hit. It tapped into to a feeling of ‘you remember when we were all excited about the Earth’.
It was actually nice talking to Sally again. She had some memories and I loved reading her memoirs although at seven volumes all with titles that pun with the word Earth – Down to Earth, An Earthy Sense of Humour and Salt of the Earth – and which, by the way, don’t even work in translation.
So I was proud when they asked me to contribute to the booklet that will go with the box set that will contain the invasion – from soup to nuts – followed by the growing fairy tale love between me and Jia and the birth of our children. You’ll find a lot here to inform and amuse and I hope in this way you will get to know a little bit what Earth was really like.
But who am I kidding? You’re just going to watch it for the giraffes!