“At the ending of the world,” mused Ule.
“Not much to look at, is it? Do you suppose we’re waiting for something? A meteor strike, perhaps?”
Ule laughed, a strange in-out chuckle through the nose. No one else did. Sven lay back on the ground, staring up at the bright white sky. Charlie looked down at his feet, and wondered what he’d find beneath the dry socks that Patrick had put on him while he slept. Would his toes be black, like the Professor’s? Probably not. He doubted anything so dramatic would repay him for the exhaustion that had liquefied his bones.
Then Ule said, “There is no meteor,” and his voice caught, and he took another slurp of tea, finishing it down to the dregs, and laid the hot cup down and tried again, breath puffing in the air. “There is no meteor,” he repeated. “The clock that measures the death of humanity stands at three minutes to midnight. The debate is whether to move it forward, not back. I was asked to advise and I said it’s too late, the night is over and the morning is here, but we won’t live to see it. Carl Sagan published a paper in the 1980s—the nuclear winter, the winter that would fall when the bombs dropped—and was called a traitor by everyone for daring to speak of the end. In the U.S., the Senators and Congressmen who decide what one of the most powerful and polluting countries in the world will do about its emissions say that the evidence is unclear. Unclear! I went diving with some of the NASA team to see the places where the coral had blanched and I couldn’t breathe, my mask worked fine and I couldn’t breathe.
“In the Amazon, you may walk for days without seeing a tree; in Beijing, the air is the colour of a bruise. Three thousand miles of litter floats in the Atlantic Ocean, plastic bags and old nappies, bumping against the side of the ships. The rhino’s horn was cut away from its still-living flesh as it died by the empty waterhole. Mud slipped down the treeless slope, crushing the village; children are born already poisoned by the water their mothers drink. I sat before a committee in Brussels and they said, ‘What do you want us to do about it? If we change now, we’ll destroy our own economies,’ and I said, ‘You have destroyed your own world’ and was asked to leave for being too subjective in my testimony. I walked the ice; as a boy I came here and I walked the ice, me and your mother, and saw so much life, life clinging on where you would have thought it would die, life that begets life that begets life that sustains the planet, just … life.”
Sven stared at the sky, said nothing at all.
“There is nothing complicated about understanding ecosystems,” sighed Ule. “We are taught at school that the plant releases oxygen that sustains animals whose bodies, as they rot, release nutrients that sustain the plants. It is no greater a step to say that the wind that blows across the mountains of America will one day touch the lakes of Zimbabwe. We have always been parochial. I understand what you mean about making a thing real.” Charlie looked up, found Ule’s gaze on him. “I understand,” repeated the old man, softer. “Death is a thing we hide from, until we can’t any more.”
Silence, as the world fell apart.
At last Patrick said, “I think you’re wrong, Professor. I think man is infinitely ingenious. I think you’re wrong.”
Sven glanced at Patrick, at Ule, looked for a moment like he might cry.
Charlie stared at his feet, and only half listened.
A beeping in Patrick’s pocket; he checked his phone, then looked up.
The helicopter was already close before they heard it, the sounds of its rotors drowned out by the cracking of the ice. Patrick rose. Uncertainly, his shoelaces undone, Charlie tried to stand too, and his head swam, and he gave up on the idea. Sven lay where he was, body turned to one side now, propping himself up on his elbow, watching Ule, as the tiger watches another of its kin, caught hunting, unexpected, in the jungle. Ule stared back. Sven shook his head, slowly, an answer to a question that had not been asked.
Ule smiled at him, looked away.
Sven reached out to hold the old man’s arm, but he was just out of his reach.
Patrick on the phone, talking to an unseen figure in the bright yellow helicopter, shouting now to be heard over the bursting of the engines, the wind pulling up jagged crystals of shattered ice from the glacier, tearing at skin and hair, the temperature plummeting with the movement. Charlie shielded his eyes against it, and was slow to notice Ule, swaying, uneven, climb to his feet.
“Charlie!” Sven cried out, voice sucked away even as he spoke, rolling, trying to extricate himself from the sleeping bag, tangled up in limb and fibre. Charlie looked round, saw Ule staggering like a drunkard, back down towards the ice.
“Wait! Stop!” Charlie crawled to his feet, teetered, caught his balance with his hands on the rock, tearing at glove and skin, stumbled up again, ran after the old man. Ule slipped as his feet hit the ice, but caught himself and ran on, arms flapping like wet flags at his sides. The glacier was not smooth, the meltwaters flowed across its surface, sores and scabs had burst within it, the packed ice snapping down and stabbing up under its own moving, internal pressure. Charlie scrambled onto the ice, fell at once, crawled back up, feet struggling to gain purchase, Sven now at his side, but the old man was already ahead, running wild. He shouted something at them as they followed, but the wind from the helicopter pulled it away.
“Stop!” Sven screamed through the engines and the thunder of the melt. “Dad, stop!”
Without stopping, Ule turned, smiled, raised one hand in a kind of greeting, and fell backwards.
Charlie didn’t even see the open wound in the ice into which he stepped, didn’t see if there was air or water below, couldn’t judge how great the gap was. Perhaps Ule was lodged in there, just a few feet down, too wide for the opening? Sven gasped, a place where sound should have been and wasn’t, and scrambling on all fours, no boots on his feet, galloped like an animal across the ice, slipping and sliding on his belly to the edge of the void, throwing himself down to peer into
an empty depth
a place where the light failed
a river beneath the flow, the walls melting fast, water running out to the wide, waiting sea.
Sven looked down, and wept.
But Charlie looked up, and beheld a figure standing on the edge of the glacier, his back turned to the scene, a hat on his head, gloves in his pockets; but still, for all that he appeared to be but a walker on the ice, he was what he was, unmistakable in the midnight sun, and he was Death, the destroyer of worlds.
The glacier shook, the world crumbled, and Death too was gone.
Chapter 24
Sometimes … There was a child, and she … and her parents, they cried, but the girl was … Sometimes there is strength in reality and …
I’m not telling it right. Let me start again.
(Charlie isn’t very good at telling stories. Discretion is an important part of his remit.)
There was a child, thirteen years old, in a hospital in Mumbai. I’d known this one was coming, I knew it. Up to then it had almost been … easy … but the appointment came and I was ready for it, even though I wasn’t. I took the plane, then a cab, and … She’d been born so ill, she didn’t have a right arm or a right leg, her face was all … The doctors said she was going to die within six to nine months, but she lived. She lived until she was five, when she got pneumonia, and her parents prepared her for death, but still she lived, and demanded to go to school and made friends with the other children on the ward—she spent most of her time in the hospital—and all the doctors and nurses loved her because she was such a happy child, such a cheerful, outgoing, beautiful child, and then when she was thirteen, her white blood cell count began to plummet and they couldn’t work out why and her name appeared on my calendar and I went to see her with a copy of a book that she’d loved as a small girl but that had gone out of print—it was hard to find, I tell you that now—and she said, “Why are you here?”
“I’m the Harbinger of Death,” I replied.
“Oh. That makes sense. Can you stay, or do you
have to go away now?”
I had imagined a hundred ways this conversation would go. A child, and I was not a warning. I had prepared a thousand things I could say, and then this—she wasn’t angry or scared, she just wanted to know if I’d stay and talk, and I felt like such an idiot. Like somehow I was making all of this about me. Unforgivable. It was just … So anyway, I said, “I can stay, a little while.”
“Good. Tell me about Death. What’s it like?”
I didn’t have an answer, but I tried anyway, told her that it was nothing to be frightened of, that everyone died, and she said, “No, stupid, not dying—I’ve been doing that my whole life. What is Death?”
“I … I don’t think I can answer that.”
“Why? Don’t you know?”
“I think everyone knows. And … and I think no one does. It’s … I think it can be hard knowing that the answer is nothing.”
She nodded at this, like a teacher whose students are finally learning an important lesson. “What’s Death like? I mean, your boss?”
“I’ve only met him once.”
“So he’s a he?”
“No. I see him that way, but everyone sees their own form of Death, when he comes. Some see him as a figure all in black, others as a woman with a bone-white face. Some see their ancient gods, some a devil, others an angel. Some see the face of the vengeance they always knew was looking for them; some see a long-lost brother. It’s always different, and every Death is always for you alone.”
“And does everyone see Death?”
“In the end, yes.”
“But you are human—you cannot visit every single person who’s going to die.”
“No. I am a courtesy, sent to places ahead of my employer for very special reasons. Sometimes I come to warn, and sometimes I come to honour.”
“Which are you for me?” she asked.
“I think … I must be here to honour. I don’t usually know, but … I think that is why.”
She didn’t cry, this girl in a hospital gown. The only time I saw her sad was when she thought about what her family would do now. I did meet the parents—I didn’t want to, but they were there as I left her room, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them who I was, why I was there. Their names were not on my appointment book, I felt no obligation to be … I was just scared. I told myself that it would not have honoured them, not as my employer would have wished. To the girl my presence brought a truth, but to them that truth would have been … So I left, and didn’t look back, but they must have sensed it somehow, because they were crying—only worse, they were trying not to cry, trying to put a brave face on it for their girl, and so they cried outside her room, and washed their eyes, and smiled when they went through the door. I … The way you do it is by never looking back. I am not Death. I visit the living, and when I leave, the living are still alive, and … and he follows after. Maybe I am a coward. When I took the job, I thought I was brave. I will do better, next time.
The girl’s dead now, of course. I didn’t see it happen, haven’t thought about it until now, but here we are.
Here we are.
Chapter 25
“There is no consensus on climate change. No, listen to me, seriously, this is a bunch of left-wing lobbyists and foreign activists trying to cut down on American jobs, American industry, this is …”
“Human cause of carbon emissions but actually volcanos …”
“Last year we cooled!”
“Technology anyway, human ingenuity, the power of humanity to shape its destiny and the planet …”
“… a balmy island, vines, wine from the Midlands, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”
“Desertification …”
“Blanket the atmosphere with sulphur, which will create an effect equivalent to …”
“Is it the end of the world? No. The world will endure. Is it the end of humanity and all those species that live within the finely tempered balance of heat, gas, water and nutrition that is currently sustained by the global biosphere? That’s a more interesting question.”
“No. Frankly: no. Nothing you say will make me change my mind.”
I should have been there for you.
Extract from a letter from Professor Ule to Sven Aglukkaq,
found posthumously amongst his papers
Chapter 26
After.
On the ice
in the place where the ice crumbled away to nothing
water flowing to the sea
water flowing of dead, black stone
Patrick had said, “I’ve got a jet going from Nuuk to La Guardia. You’d be welcome on it.”
And Charlie answered, “Thank you. No.” And found that he had nothing else to say.
No one had tried to look for Ule’s body beneath the crumbling world. One day, a medic from the helicopter ambulance whispered, someone will find it, perhaps, preserved just like it was, on the edge of the water. Or it will be carried out to sea, and vanish for ever, and perhaps that’s for the best.
Sven had walked, one man supporting him under each arm, to the helicopter. They’d put him inside, and he’d said not a word, and seen nothing, and been surprised when they’d landed just outside Oounavik, the whole town gathering for his return. Ane had come with blankets to wrap him in, and reverently, gently, without speech or ceremony, they’d taken him home.
Charlie had stayed on the helicopter. It seemed disrespectful to walk amongst these quiet people again, and besides, his work was done.
There was a hospital in Qeqertarsuaq. There were two doctors on shift, and a nurse who also worked as a fisherman and was, he admitted, not really that well trained but he knew enough; the midwife was better at these things than he was, but she’d been called away to a village some seventy miles up the coast.
Charlie sat on the edge of one of the beds in a hushed ward of strangers, and let himself be prodded and poked. Light was shone in his eyes, feet examined, fingers examined, and finally he was told, “Just have a lie-down. Have a little sleep.”
He slept for nearly twenty hours, and woke with the feeling that light would pass through him, and he wasn’t there at all.
Inside the helicopter, flying south, there were words that Patrick had said, but Charlie had been too tired to hear them. Now, as he watched the endless low spinning of the sun across the ceiling of the hospital ward, he tried to piece them back together again, clutch them out of the roar of the helicopter engine, the fall of the glacier, the heaviness in his body.
I am a witness, the man had said. I am called to witness the ending of the world. Death called me, and I came. Was the old man it? Was I there to see an old man die? Who was he?
Charlie hadn’t answered—at least, he couldn’t remember speaking. He wondered if he would ever speak again.
Who was he? Patrick hollered over the helicopter blades. Why did he matter?
In the summer sun, the ice fell, and Charlie slept.
Another helicopter ride, then another, town-hopping south, back to Nuuk. In Nuuk, people smiled and were pleased to see him—how was it, how was your trip on the ice, did you see wonderful things, so beautiful, so beautiful out there!
And because they smiled, Charlie smiled back and said yes, yes, beautiful I suppose, but also strange, all of it so very strange …
The plane to Reykjavik, and in Reykjavik he found that Milton Keynes had booked a twenty-four hour stopover and a hotel with hot springs round the back, smelling of sulphur and eye-pinching minerals dissolved in the heat, and he sat in the pool and marvelled that this was what hot felt like, and imagined that frost was finally melting from the middle of his bones, and when at Heathrow the immigration man said, “Welcome home, sir,” Charlie smiled and said, “Thank you,” and thought the Piccadilly Line had never seemed so beautiful or the sky so bright.
The day after he got home, he phoned Emmi, asked if she was okay, if she wanted to … you know.
But she was in Newcastle for work, and then he receive
d a new appointment in his diary, and the plane to Urumqi took off two hours before her train got back and for the very first time, Charlie was reluctant to go.
Part 3
CHAMPAGNE
Chapter 27
“Well of course she hasn’t been doing as well in school as I’d like, and she’s forgotten her times tables—forgotten them. I mean, she can do her five and her twos but that’s it, and I use my times tables every day and so I was thinking of getting a private tutor, because at the school all they ever do are poster projects and that’s the primary school syllabus, I know, but it’s madness and she’s so much better than that.”
“Nipple hair is just the worst.”
“How can you be a nurse and not believe in science? I asked her and she was just rude, rude I tell you, and I was like, did God put the drip in, did God fit the surgical drain, but she said that I didn’t understand, that I was harassing her, questioning her deeply held beliefs, and she’s lazy too, I’ll tell you that, lazy. Maybe God does the paperwork.”
“I think what you’re talking about—women who get pregnant like that—well I think you’re talking about a particular class of women. I think generally the women who get raped and beaten by their partners, well that’s a particular part of society and actually is part of that society, not what you make it out to be at all.”
“That’s not new season, I’ve seen new season …”
“If you are self-employed then don’t go crying to the taxpayer when you choose to have kids; your uterus is not our problem, thank you very much …”
“Men are not treated as equal to women. In the past women valued their looks, they were trained to be submissive, but now …”
“Boom! Lemme hear you say it!”
“He talks about social equality, about narrowing the pay gap, more hospitals, more schools, better transport, protecting the elderly, protecting the environment, about the rich not getting richer and the poor not getting poorer, but I want to know how is he going to pay for it? I don’t want to pay more taxes; I just want this country to work.”