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Kallie was twenty-four years old, but held no memory of those fabulous sun-soaked times before the great freeze. Like a man blind from birth, he had not even been granted the pleasure of memories. Be
And perhaps Be
He added an itchy red woollen sweater to the other layers of his clothing, then wound a scarf around his chest. Over this he struggled into his greatcoat, dug out leather gloves with split seams, tucked his jeans into the tops of his battered Caterpillar boots.
When he unlatched the front door and looked out, he was surprised to find snow drifting in the hall. It had been nearly two months since his last foray into the streets of what had once recognisably been Camden Town. The tall windows at the end of the floor had been broken by children, and the snow had formed a drift below the sill. If any of his neighbours still lived in the building, they were not prepared to answer his knock. Kallie rapped on Mr Jakobowski's door and listened with his ear placed to the peeling brown paintwork.
'Mr Jakobowski, I'm going outside. Do you want me to get you anything?'
He was sure he could hear someone moving around in the sitting room, but what could he do if the old man wasn't prepared to let anyone help him? In these strange times, who knew how people would behave? Something electrical hummed beyond the door. It sounded as if he had a radiator ru
Down the icy stairwell – the lift had not worked in thirteen years – to the front door, which was so frozen shut that Kallie assumed no-one had been in or out since Be
Throwing his weight against the door, he shifted it wide enough to push his way through. Bayonets of ice divorced themselves from the lintel and fell about him, cutting stencils into the swathes of snow that crusted the steps. Kallie raised his face into the biting wind and looked along the street, in the direction of the city. The air stole his breath, forcing a gasp with the realisation that it was far colder than anything he had experienced before.
Snow dunes, sparkling like hills of granulated jewels, swept in great unspoilt arcs across a bleached Sahara of roads and pavements. This was a bad sign; the route had been passable the last time he ventured out. But now even those high-profile charity missions the government was fond of a
On his last trip, Kallie had seen a few heavy-traction vehicles lumbering toward town. No people, though. There were never any people. It was simply too dangerous to set out on your own. He vaguely recalled a shopping expedition with his parents, and some friends of theirs who owned a car fitted with snowtyres. His mother had bought crazy things, pointless things, floral dresses and summer blouses she would never be warm enough to wear. Anxious to be rid of their stock, the storekeepers had been bargained down to nothing. He would always remember his mother laughing in front of the mirror as she held the diaphanous chiffon material against her. Ironically, her refusal to lose hope had brought her to a protracted, painful end.
What had instilled his parents with such unreasoning optimism? Was it because they remembered a time when their world was a cacophony of movement and sound, when trees still flowered, when their vision was saturated with rainbow colours? Had they never lost sight of life's possibilities? Is that why they had allowed him to be born?
It took forty minutes to reach the deserted high street, silent but for the wind that moaned eerily around the corners of buildings like a widow at a wake. At Camden Lock the ice in the canals had expanded and crushed itself upwards into fantastic twisted geometries. Kallie pulled the fur hood of his coat tighter around his face and concentrated on placing one foot before the other. The secret was to keep moving, always keep moving.
There were no shops open at all in the high street. This was a worrying new development. Surely some signs of life still existed? In the last few years he had seen fewer and fewer people on the crystalline streets. Many had found ways of moving to the southern hemisphere. Some had chosen to stay because they were determined to rebuild their lives in the face of the changed climate. And there were the others, the ones who had no money and no way of leaving alive.
As he trudged on, staying wide of the treacherously deep drifts, he remembered a picture he had seen once, a framed tube poster from the 1930s. The fanciful painting showed a gigantic cherub with translucent blue skin, a symbolic representation of the North Wind, perched on the roof of Oxford Circus tube station, breathing icy air down over the scurrying populace. The message was something about getting in out of the cold. Such bright pigments, such warmth, all gone now, gone forever. The sheer white force of snow and ice blotted every other colour from the landscape.