Personal Demons

'You were listening, weren't you, Kallie?' he asked wearily, throwing his crayon away.

'Heard it all before, prof. Nothing we can do, right?'

'Right. A friend of yours was in the other day. Tuesday.'

Kallie could not imagine why he still bothered to work out the names of individual days. Nobody else did. 'What was his name?' he asked.

'Be

That was it, then. No chance of getting his wallet back now. It was hard enough staying alive when you were sober, let alone drunk.

'Someone else was looking for you,' said the professor, an almost playful tone in his voice. Without asking, Kallie knew who.

'How is she?' he said finally. The professor gri

'I know.' He cut the conversation short, uninterested in hearing an embroidered account of how, a year ago, he had saved Shari's life. 'I have to go.'

'I understand,' the professor answered with mock solemnity. 'You're a busy man. You know, I think it's time you considered moving in here with us while the generator still holds out. You get used to the smell, and it's worth it to be warm.'

'Thanks for the offer,' he mumbled, rebuttoning his coat. 'I'll keep it in mind.' Moving in meant being a part of the professor's ever-changing extended family, which meant looking after sick kids and hysterical, gangrenous parents.

'Shari will be sorry she missed you.'

I'll bet, he thought. He was suspicious of Shari since the accident; she was too nice to him now. 'Say hi to her for me.' He waved to Mrs Quintero as he pushed against the exit door.

Outside, the rising wind drove the temperature still lower. He reached the bottom of the slope below the supermarket and saw what he initially took to be a pile of brown rags, but closer inspection revealed a rigid hand, its fingers clutching the gelid air as if trying to take hold on life itself. Crystals of ice had formed over the corpse's eyes like luxuriant cataracts. Kallie cracked open its jacket and felt around for his wallet, but found nothing. Be

He knelt and bowed his head for a moment. No prayer, just a few seconds of stillness. They had spent their childhood years together; he owed Be

On a suicidal impulse he decided to push further on into the city centre, something he had not done for over four years. He wanted to see the River Thames, to prove for himself that this life-cha

As he passed the cylindrical ruin of the Telecom Tower, he thought of Shari; how she had been passing him somewhere near here on her way back to the supermarket, and how the Red Cross van had swung wildly around the corner. He remembered the lethal guillotine of ice sliding from its roof in a broad oblong sheet, and how he had thrown himself at her with a shout, slamming her body to the pavement as the ice shattered above their heads. It was the first time he had touched a girl. Up until then, the thought of physical contact with anyone had made him shudder uncontrollably. Shari had hugged him tight, clinging to the life she had nearly lost. Kallie had gently disentangled himself, embarrassed. He had shu

The freezing wind sucked at his greatcoat as he waded knee-deep through the intersection at Charlotte Street. His right foot had gone numb; a dangerous sign, one which suggested he should at least find a warm place to rest up for a few minutes. But there was nothing open around here. He continued past the shuttered, padlocked stores, concentrating on reaching Leicester Square and the circus beyond, unable to afford the luxury of worrying about his safety. Without realising it, he had reached a decision. The river was no longer just a point in his journey, but the point of the journey. After arriving there he felt sure he would have no need of further goals.

In Rathbone Place he passed a dying dog, a red setter, half buried in an avalanche of dislodged ice. The shards that sparkled in its diamante fur lent it an air of ostentatious glamour.

Oxford Street. Once a cheap-and-cheerful marketplace thronged with shoppers, according to his father. Now a wind-ravaged tu

Soho was impassable. The narrow streets were blocked with abandoned trucks and boulders created by the sheet-ice that slid continuously from the rooftops. The upper floors were skeined with billowing crosshairs of ice that caught the dying light like the wings of giant dragonflies.

Kallie skirted around into Regent Street, the great curve of Nash's terrace pockmarked by the blown-in windows of department stores. The pale sun had descended behind the buildings as he reached the blue-shadowed end of the street. Here the wind was at its fiercest. A red double-decker Routemaster bus lay on its side, almost buried by drifts. A diamond shop had lost its panes, the ground floor now extravagantly filled with iridescent icicles, so that it appeared little changed from its window-dressed heyday.

The snow in the circus was sullied by the discharges of overturned trucks and the tracks of pilgrims who had come here in the vain hope that reaching this gaudy apex of civilisation might somehow end their own spiritual loss. As man descended once more into beast, the manufactured tokens of a forgotten sophisticated world took on the power of talismen. Kallie watched as an elderly woman floundered past with a green plastic Harrods bag on her head. Earlier that day, at Mornington Crescent, he had seen two young men dragging an electronic exercise machine toward the tube station, perhaps intending to install it as an object of veneration.

And here was Eros, poor Eros, intended as an inspiration to Londoners, now twisted from its perch so that only a leg and an elegant silvery wing of Gilbert's famous statue could be seen thrusting hopelessly up from the dunes in the centre of the roundabout. Kallie stood before the fallen God and grimaced in despair, heaving in gulps of stinging knife-sharp air as he stared at the upturned calf and ankle, the feathered wingtip almost lost in snow and discarded chunks of scaffolding. Then he was ru

Kallie stumbled blindly away, tipping over into the oil-stained drifts, pushing himself back on to his feet, scrabbling around the long-abandoned traffic until he came up against the steel-shuttered doorway of Tower Records. There was nothing else for him here, and nowhere else for him to go, so he remained completely still, unable to think or move. As night fell, the warmth within him slowly faded. At his back, giant cut-outs of forgotten rock stars struck poses of defiance, icons of redundant anarchy.