‘And I think if I don’t get out of London, I’m going to die in a prison cell.’
Her hands go up to her face then.
‘Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that.’
‘Nan, I don’t know what my number is. But a fuck-load of people are going to die here, and maybe I’m one of them.’
She slumps down in the chair and runs her hands through her hair. It’s a while since she’s dyed it and the grey roots are showing through. For once, she’s speechless. I think at last I’ve got through to her. I know I’ve got to get out of here, and maybe she’ll come with me.
‘Let’s pack some bags now, leave tonight.’
She looks up from the chair.
‘What about that girl …?’
Sarah. And her number. The number that tells me I won’t die in a cell. Or does it?
Nan’s question’s still hanging in the air when the doorbell rings. We both freeze. My first thought is that it’s Sarah. The old witch has summoned her up. My heart starts pounding in my chest. What if it is? What’ll I do? What’ll I say? My second thought is that it’s the police. They’ve found the knife. My heart won’t let up pounding.
‘You gonna get that?’ Nan asks.
‘Dunno,’ I say, and I bite the edge of my lip.
‘Don’t sound like they’re going to go away. Go on, Adam. Save my old legs.’
I go to the front door. It’s dark outside, so I flick on the light as I open the door.
There’s a boy on the doorstep, a little kid with glasses. For a minute I can’t remember where I’ve seen him before. He clocks my face and looks away, but then he looks back again, at my eyes, not my skin.
‘I’m … I’m sorry …’ he stammers. His face twitches and the penny drops – Nelson, the boy from Maths Club.
‘What are you sorry for?’ I ask.
‘For your accident, for coming here. I just thought you should have this …’ He holds out a sheet of paper, rolled up with a rubber band round the middle.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘It’s those birthdays. I plotted them. Only …’
‘What?’
‘Only … they’re not birthdays, are they?’ The twitch in his face is going mad. All I can think of is, More evidence, printed, plotted, mapped.
‘You better come in.’
We flatten out the printout on the coffee table in the lounge. It’s a map of West London covered in dots. There are so many dots you can’t hardly see the map underneath.
‘I worked with the data you gave me, although I don’t think it stands up to scrutiny. Anyway, it was what I had so I had a go. I looked up postcodes, had to make a best guess for some of them, and plotted them. Different colours for the different dates – there’s a key by the side there. The bigger the circle, the more people. I’ve done it in bands, the smallest dot for up to five, then five to ten, ten to twenty, and the biggest one for over twenty.’
He’s done black for the first of January, blue for the second, red for the third, and so on.
‘So where are we?’
Nelson points to an area with a massive black dot on.
‘Where do you live, Nelson?’ He points again. Black.
We sit and look at it for a minute in silence. Nelson keeps looking at me and back at the map. His face is going mad – twitch, twitch, twitch. Finally, he pushes his glasses further up his nose, and says what he’s been screwing himself up to say.
‘I don’t think it’s birthdays, Adam. There are too many in some places and the distribution is so uneven. What is it? What are these dates?’
I look at him blinking nervously at me, face dancing on its own. It’s there in his eyes. His number. 112027. If I can’t save the world, perhaps I can save him. Perhaps the best place to start is the truth. There’s a voice in my head, Mum’s voice, but I push it to the back of my mind.
Then another voice cuts in.
‘Tell ’im. Tell ’im the truth.’ Nan’s standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘They’re death dates,’ I say. ‘I can see them. Do you believe me?’
Nelson blinks and swallows. I can’t help looking at him, and his number makes me scared. Scared for him, scared for me.
‘I do believe you,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand, but I do believe you, ‘cause it’s all over the internet, Adam. Here, let me show you.’
He leans down next to the sofa and fetches up a laptop case. He unzips it, puts the machine on his lap and switches it on.
‘I did some research around the first date, New Year’s Day. There are sites all over Western Europe with hints about it. Weird things on forums and blogs. There’s a cult up in Scotland, predicting the apocalypse on the first. They’ve moved to an island, and holed up there. Their leader’s quoted on a ton of sites saying, “We have all sinned. God’s retribution is coming and those without God will die on New Year’s Day. I have seen the truth in their eyes.”’
He calls up a site.
‘Good,’ he says, ‘it’s still here.’
There’s a blurry photo of a man in the middle of a circle of people.
‘Who is he? This guy?’
‘None of the sites give his full name. He’s known as Micah.’
A chill runs down my spine and I shiver.
‘He can see the numbers too,’ I say. ‘That’s what he’s saying. That’s what he means.’
‘There’s a lot of nutters out there. There always have been. There’s a whole history of people saying the end of the world is about to happen and it never has.’
‘Do you think I’m a nutter?’
Nelson hesitates for a second. His face twitches unhappily.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to answer.’
‘No, no,’ he says, ‘I don’t think you are. It’s just … I just can’t explain what you’re seeing. I can’t think of a scientific explanation. What do you see?’
‘I don’t know if I even see the numbers or if I just think them. When I look in someone’s eyes, the number’s just there. It’s there and I know it. I’ve always been able to see them.’
‘And they’re the date when the person dies?’
‘Yeah. My mum, other people. I’ve seen their numbers. I’ve seen their deaths.’
Nelson don’t know what to do with himself, where to look. He’s not the kind of guy who can come right out and ask me his number. But he’s thinking it, and I’m seeing it, and I’m cursing this thing, this gift, this burden. I wish I could say something, tell him he’s going to be okay, but his number’s screaming at me, tearing through my head.
‘Nelson … mate …’ I start to say, but he gets agitated ‘cause he don’t know what’s coming next.
He clears his throat and his fingers tap across the keyboard.
‘The Government knows something, too,’ he blurts out. ‘Look. They’re blocking public events. All licence applications across London from 30th December onwards have been refused. It’s coming up to New Year’s Eve, Adam, they’ve got to be worried to cancel parties on New Year’s Eve.’
‘The Government knows …?’
‘Looks like it. As soon as 01 01 pops up on a site, they close it down. That’s why I was surprised that image of Micah was still there.’
I should be pleased, shouldn’t I? Pleased I’m not mad. Pleased other people know something about the first. That I’m not on my own. But all I feel is a wave of panic. Every nerve end’s vibrating, my whole body’s on red alert. It’s real. It’s happening.
‘There’s something closer to home too. If it’s still there. I bookmarked it … here.’ He brings up another web-page and slides the laptop over to me. At first I don’t get what it is he’s trying to show me. The screen’s full of a picture, something painted.
‘You have to scroll left and right to see the whole thing.’
It looks like a war zone: darkness, chaos, a sky full of smoke, hands reaching out of rubble, gaping holes where there should be houses.
I scroll right. The
re’s a date, like a banner across the top: 1st January 2027. And then the blacks and greys and browns turn into reds and yellows and oranges, as flames lick across the screen. Nelson isn’t looking at the laptop; he’s watching me to see my reaction. I scroll across again, and now there’s faces, twisted with pain and terror. There’s a baby with its eyes screwed up, tears flying off its face and a man holding it, a black guy. The flames are reflected in his eyes, but it’s not his eyes that turn my guts to water, it’s his face. The skin is scarred and bumpy.
It’s me.
I’m the guy in the picture.
I’m the one with flames in his eyes.
I’m fighting the urge to gag. I’m trying not to smell the smoke, hear the angry crackling of the flames.
‘What is it?’ Nan comes and looks over my shoulder. The smoke from the end of her fag curls into my face and I start choking. She wafts it away from me, but it’s too late. I’m back there, helpless as the fire eats into me. I’m coughing my guts up, I can’t breathe.
I stagger over to the front door. Outside, I bend over, coughing and retching over Nan’s collection of gnomes, until finally I’m sick.
‘Adam! Adam! Are you all right? Mind Norris. He’s my favourite. Oh God, you got ’im.’
Nan’s beside me, watching while I spew up everything in my stomach. Then, after one last spasm, my whole body starts to relax. Cool night air surges into my lungs, and bit by bit, I unpeel and stand up again. We stay there for a while, me breathing in and out, remembering what it’s like to feel human again, Nan tutting about her garden ornaments.
When we go back in Nelson is packing up his laptop.
‘Where was it, that painting?’ I ask him.
‘Paddington, under the railway, just off Westbourne Park Road.’
‘I’ll have to go there, have a look.’ Even thinking about it gives me the jitters.
‘Nelson?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You should get out of London. You should get away from here.’
‘What? With my mum and my brothers? Where we gonna go?’
‘I dunno, somewhere. Take them off that map anyway.’
He shakes his head.
‘I could try. But what do I tell them? How do I get them to go?’
‘I dunno. That’s the million dollar question and if I knew the answer, I’d broadcast it to the nation. Get everyone out. Everyone out of London.’
Nan’s looking at me now, and there’s a gleam in her eye.
‘That’s more like it,’ she says. ‘That’s the spirit!’
‘Na-an …’ She’s looking at me like I’m the Messiah again.
‘You can do it, Adam. You can save people.’
Nelson looks quickly from me to her and back again. If I was him, I’d make a quick exit and not look back. But I’m not him, and instead of making a bolt for the door, he says, ‘It’s the internet. That’s where you can do it. They control the main servers and search engines, but there’s a whole parallel web they haven’t got to yet, a million blogs and forums and tweets. It can be out there before anyone can stop it.’
‘You’re a genius,’ I say.
He shakes his head, but you can tell he’s pleased. ‘Technically, I’d need an IQ of over 140 for that, and I’m only 138.’
‘What’s a couple of points between friends? Listen, I don’t know squat about the internet. Can you do it?’
He frowns.
‘Not straight away. I don’t know much about the para-web. I’d need to create a hidden identity and find a way to stop them tracing me.’
‘Will you try?’
‘Sure.’ He gives me his address and mobile number.
Nan closes the door behind him and grins at me.
‘We’re doing it, Adam. We’re going to change history.’
I want to get caught up in it like her. I want to believe we can make a difference. But I keep coming back to the numbers and how I’ve never been able to change them before. Mum, Junior, Carl. Are we just kidding ourselves?
And in the middle of it all, the mass of numbers, all those deaths coming to London, there’s me. Someone’s painted me at the heart of it, swallowed up in flames. They must know me, or have seen me, to get my number, to picture my death like that.
So I won’t be packing my bags tonight, because I know what I’ve got to do next. I’ve got to find the person who painted me. I’ve got to find them and look them in the eye.
I set off early the next day, catch a couple of buses and then walk. I need to follow the railway line and it don’t take me long to find it. The street that leads to the subway is empty. Some rubbish blows up in the air towards me. I dodge it and jog on.
It’s a dark place even in the daytime. The walls either side are covered with graffiti. When I get close I slow down. I stop at the entrance, suddenly scared. I make myself take a few deep breaths, and then I go in. What I notice first is the cold on my fingers and my face, and the way sounds from outside are muffled in here while sounds inside are bigger, so even my shoes scraping on the rough surface make a loud noise. It smells wet and dark and mouldy, and then, suddenly, there’s something else.
A whiff of smoke catching in my nose, at the back of my throat. The crackle of flames. A woman screaming.
And it’s there in front of me.
The picture from the web – the face. My face. And now I can see how big the painting is, it’s massive, floor to ceiling and five metres long.
‘Oh my God,’ I say and my voice echoes off the walls.
It was a shock just seeing it on screen in sections, but this is something else.
I want to step back and take the whole thing in, but there’s nowhere to step back to – the tunnel’s only a few metres wide.
So I reach towards it instead. My arm’s shaking, my whole body is. My skin’s red hot, there’s sweat soaking into my hat, trickling down between my shoulder blades. I put my hand on the wall. The writing’s huge. My fingers are flat against the paint, stretched out, but they don’t even cover the bottom half of the 7. The wall’s so cold and my skin’s so hot. I take my hood down, peel off my hat and go right up close. I put both hands to the wall and lean my head in too, so my forehead’s against the brick.
It’s like some kind of religious experience. I’ve held the numbers inside for so long and here’s proof I’m not alone. Someone else knows. 2027 has haunted me. But here – in a cold, dark tunnel in West London, with that picture of death and destruction over me and round me – I know there’s someone else sharing that pain. It feels like coming home.
The brick under my skin is alive. I can feel it through my fingers; it’s humming in my ears and coming up through the soles of my feet. I can hear noises again, the screaming, the flames licking up, a deep rumbling sound getting louder and louder. It’s filling my head now. I stand my ground but I close my eyes tight shut. The vibration and the noise are the same thing, building up around me, inside me. There’s flames and faces, twisted, distorted, terrified.
I open my mouth and scream. It’s the sound I made when I fell in the fire, an animal noise coming out of the middle of me. The tunnel’s not bricks and stones any more, it’s a wild, living, roaring beast, a living nightmare. My scream goes on until there’s no breath in me.
Then I breathe and scream again.
The rumbling and clattering dies down, and I’m left with my voice echoing off the walls and the thunder of an express train dwindling away to a background hum, and then nothing.
I step back from the wall and open my eyes. I don’t know what just happened to me: how much of it was real. My hands are freezing. I rub them together, then hold them up to my mouth and blow on them. The discs of light either end of the tunnel are grey and there’s rain slanting across them. My eyes are playing tricks on me, confused by the painting in front of me, up close in the dark, and the light outside, so it takes me a while to grasp someone’s standing at the other end of the tunnel, not walking, just standing.
I can
only see an outline: baggy trousers, some sort of jacket and a spike of hair. And all of sudden I realise how lonely and isolated this place is.
Shit, I’m going to get battered.
I don’t need any aggro, so I start walking the other way. Keep cool. Don’t show you’re rattled. Out in the open, I turn round for a second to see if I’m being followed. He’s still there, watching me. I stop walking and make myself stand and look back at him. Both of us standing in the rain, both of us looking. And then the hairs on the back of my neck go up. We’re a long way from each other but our eyes meet and I get a warm rush.
It’s not a boy, it’s a girl. The girl who hates me, the girl whose last breath surrounds me as she slips away in fifty years’ time.
Sarah.
Chapter 30: Sarah
I see him before he sees me. The weird thing is I kind of know he’s going to be there even before I turn the corner. It’s not a complete surprise. And I ask myself, why did I walk this way? It’s raining, it’s quicker to go through the estate to get to the shop, not round the back, but I walked this way. Why?
Seeing him in the flesh – the real thing, not the picture in my head, on the wall – brings me out in goosebumps. I’m scared of him. I’m thrilled as well. What the fuck is wrong with me?
I should turn around before he notices me. Turn around and walk away. No, I should run. He’s the boy in my nightmare. The boy in my future, who takes my baby and walks into the fire. He’s evil, so why am I still standing here?
Chapter 31: Adam
'Sarah!’
She don’t move, so I start walking towards her. I get ten metres away, and then she reacts.
‘Stop there. Don’t get any nearer.’
She sounds unsure.
‘I just want to talk to you.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say.’
‘It was you, wasn’t it? You put me up there. Why have you put me up on that wall?’
‘You know. You know what you do.’ Her voice is low and quiet, but I can hear the poison in it. She hates me. She thinks I’m disgusting.
‘I don’t! I don’t know!’
I take a step towards her. She steps back and bends down to pick up a stone.