Saturday 17 February 2007

Chapter 2

Disaster slipped up on us almost unnoticed. It all happened so gradually, no drama at all. Well, at the beginning anyway. Yes, sometimes the weather definitely would seem to be changing. Then it would seem to go pretty much back to the way it had been before. But I guess it never really ever went right back to normal, whatever normal might have been. Don't you remember the first storms, the hurricanes? Do you remember those first hot, dry summers? All those strange, warm winters? The droughts? People thought it was an improvement when it really warmed up and there weren't any more dreary, rainy winters like we used to have. So we all adjusted to the new weather. We moaned and bitched about it a lot, as usual, but did nothing, as usual. But all the time, we were like lobsters being boiled to death in cold water over a slow fire.

Of course it was simply impossible to believe what was happening at first. The doom-criers crept out every once in a while, nagging us, bleating about their theories of disaster and begging for more money. A new ice age one week, a global Sahara the next, a giant meteorite rushing at us the other. The newspapers got hold of half-baked stories from ambitious academics with axes to grind. That improved circulation for a few weeks and everyone sane was worried sick; kids went sobbing to their beds with terror. Then we all forgot about the weather for a while when the media frenzy moved on to the next bonk'n'politics scandal.

A few people might possibly have suspected what really was happening. Governments didn't know much and they didn't particularly seem to want to know what they really did know; even if they’d known, they couldn’t have managed a piss in a public toilet. Maybe we geologists should have known better, though. Maybe we should have looked at those Old Red Sandstone deposits just a bit more carefully. Maybe millions of years of thick, wind-drifted desert sands might have been trying to whisper something to us that we didn't particularly want to hear.

Even now, nobody really seems to know what's happened or why. We get less and less news. It may not even have been we humans who caused it. You can be sure that there aren't that many hair sprays or cars being used today and the climate change continues to proceed full tilt. OK, maybe we did pull some sensitive little trigger for world climate change, fluttered the wrong butterfly wing. But maybe then it's all just a part of some gigantic natural cycle. We could just be flattering ourselves about our importance in the scheme of things. Maybe we're like the old joke about the flea and the elephant. You know that one? Flea climbs on elephant and starts humping it. Head elephant starts to run, for reasons totally and absolutely unconnected with fleas or bitten elephant. Flea's elephant follows the elephant leader. Flea hangs on for dear life, crying with delight, "Suffer, baby, suffer!". Well, maybe I'm not remembering the joke right. I'm sure you get the idea, though.

Lizzie, my wife, says that's not how the joke goes at all and that I'm crazy to even bother writing all this stuff down. She says that nobody will be around to read it after we're gone, so why bother with it? Even if there is somebody, she says, they won't know how to read it or give a damn what happened to the people who caused all this, except in the worst possible way. Well, maybe she's right. Civilisation proved to be very flimsy stuff, after all, when the chips fell. But I don't know, though. We're a hardy race. Look at how those poor Ethiopians used to hang right on in there through thick and thin; quite possibly they're still down there hanging on, though it must be jolly thin pickings for them if Britain's anything to go by. Still, I'd bet we humans will muddle on through this, somehow. As long as things don't get too much worse, I mean. Even then, we might evolve, if anyone’s up to breeding at the moment.

Well, anyway, I've got this thick, tatty old diary, or part of it anyway, to fill up and plenty of spare time to fill it up in. Really miss my computer. We have to stay down here underground so much. Time hangs awfully heavy on our hands when the winds blow. Writing's a better amusement than staring at blank walls. And maybe things will change back to the way they were. Who knows? Then my journal will be history, hooray!

* * *

Perhaps you didn't happen to see my name on the inside of the front cover. It's Richard Allen Turner, in case you missed it. Yeah, that's right, initials R.A.T.; my Dad was a bit of a card, hah, hah, hah - Canadian, actually, totally funny. If you got as far as reading down to here, then you must have figured out that my wife's name is Elizabeth. We're Dick and Lizzie to our friends. I'm Ratty to Lizzie when she's in a nice mood and Fucking Old Rat when she's not. And since you've gotten this far into the ledger, then you've got to be a friend or completely taken over The Bunker, anyway.

'Hi there, friend!' says Dick, trying out a bit of dialogue. Christ that looks bloody stupid! Still, I'm bound to get this dialogue business sorted out one of these days, so please bear with me. Years of academic writing killed my creativity, shrivelled it all up like an old man’s dick. I can never remember, even, whether the punctuation mark goes inside or outside the quotes. But at least this isn't like writing a thesis or some frigging scholarly article, thank God. Not by a long shot. For one thing, this is a lot of fun. You can smile a bit and maybe even let a quiet little chuckle slip out, every now and then. You could even, if you were inclined that way, exaggerate a little, twist things slightly, plump up the truth, make yourself sound a bit better than you were - maybe a whole lot better. Not that I have, of course. This is the plain, unvarnished truth, as they say - right between the eyes. Oh, love those metaphors and to mix 'em all up!

You may have picked up the idea that I'm a geologist. You know, a guy who looks at rocks and fossils, that sort of thing. Was a geologist, might be a better way to put it. But it should be really very interesting to be a geologist in geologically interesting times, I suppose. Homo sap might just leave a nice, interesting little marker horizon for some other geologists a few hundred million years from now; a black smear, a sort of knicker-stain in the rocks. Oh, I can hear those future geologists arguing bitterly among themselves; oh, I can just picture them: "We are absolutely positive, Dr Xlxlchch. This greasy streak must be the Human Horizon. Just take that sample in your anterior claw and hold it to your ventral sensor. You can smell the cadmium and lead concentrations quite clearly. We say that this is the place where we must drill for plastic!" All our hopes, passion, work and folly, scrunched up into a dark little smear of rock an three millimetres thick with two large bugs earnestly discussing how to harvest our garbage. Oh, my.

Well, I really was a lousy geologist, no matter what anyone else might have thought. I was too dumb in school to do something really interesting. Such a pity, too, I'd really have liked to have led a life of economic crime, I mean, I'd have liked to have been either a merchant banker or a stock broker. Anyway, all that striding around purposefully with those pointy little hammers sounded really cool when I was at an impressionable age with deeply underdeveloped social skills. So I picked geology as my subject for university: the rest was pure railroad: good student becomes research student and so on. The walking around was OK, when the weather was nice, but the subject never really fired me up all that much. The hammer was only useful for hanging up pictures or until civilisation fell. Now, of course, that hammer's useful all the time, one way or another.

Fortunately for my sanity at the time, I managed to dabble in a lot of other things I liked much better than geology. Stupid idea, really, expecting teenagers to decide how they think they're going to have to spend the rest of their lives. It may have been a mistake, but I managed to be a dedicated amateur in whatever I did and I did whatever I did pretty well, if not earnestly - better than most of your so-called professionals, anyway. The only difference between me and the professionals was that they did it for the money and would've done absolutely anything to have kept their jobs. I never cared that much. You might definitely call me a professional survivor, though. I think I've found my real vocation at last you know: staying alive. All my messing around in this, that and the other was great preparation for the great mess we all ended up in.

Like it or not, I guess I've got geology to thank for being alive today. Some people wouldn't call what we've got today much of a life, but it's the only one we've got, love it or leave it, and all evidence points to their only being one per person. So we might as well stick around and see how things poke along. If worst comes to worst, we can always die. That was a joke, by the bye. This is a stiff upper lip establishment, sort of, and we wouldn't have it any other way. Besides, the End-of-the-World-As-We-Knew-It hasn't been nearly as bad as expected, at least for those who survived. Sometimes, I think, I haven't ever had it all that much better, in a very, very crazy sort of way. Less stress, striving and worry, I guess is what I mean.

As I was saying when I interrupted myself, geology saved our lives. A few years back, I was doing very nicely, thank you, in fast moving consumer goods down in London; much too well, in fact. I was getting jolly bored. How I moved into academia via FMCG's from an oil exploration bubble in the Antarctic is a very long and faintly implausible story. Anyway, this sharp academic cove I met at some function or another must have smelled the boredom off me. I should have known better: he had this really slicked-back, thick silver hair. The next thing I knew, I was wined, dined and offered the chair of geology at the University of Cymru at Conwy. Stunned by the execrable food, excellent drink and their brazen impunity, I took their shilling. When I came to, I found myself chained to an oar in the Welsh countryside, instead of gently fleecing bleating A/B's in the Home Counties at three times the salary, plus bonus and choice of executive cars. On taking up the appointment, Lizzie didn't speak anything but Welsh to me for a month. And the only Welsh either of us knows, even now, is "Dim Parcio".

So we sold our London dez rez, standard suburban bliss, at the peak of some house feeding frenzy for millions, even after paying off the mortgage. We bought this enormous rambling pile of a place, high up here in the hills, for about as much as the garage would have sold for in town. Got about fifteen acres of prime scrub with it, plus small herd of sheep. The sheep were sort of a hobby for me and kept the grass down pretty well. The stately Victorian folly, architecturally vandalised in the 1970s, wasn't too far from the sinecure, but not too near, either. We got a faithful old Land Rover to keep the redundancy Mercedes company. You didn't think I was foolish enough to resign from FMCG, did you? They threw the car in with the golden boot up the backside fifteen minutes after I told my boss I'd been approached by one of our competitors and thought only it fair to warn him that I was giving the offer serious consideration. What they didn't know was that I would have left for nothing, just so long as I had an excuse to miss the Christmas Party.

I started with the notion of filling the old house with light and laughter, making it an oasis of hospitality for staff and students. Well, I spent the next three years trying to get to know my university staff and colleagues. Without a great deal of success, I must say. I finally trapped one of the more doe-like Senior Lecturers in the Senior Commons Room loo. He went to earth in one of the stalls but I just went and introduced myself from under the door. After the ice was broken, I had no real trouble with them at all. University people aren't really standoffish; they're just very, very timid. They even admitted they would have come around and introduced themselves, given a year or two longer to get used to seeing me around the place. Having them visit us at home was simply out of the question, of course.

Nevertheless, university life was such a hoot. You could wear, say or think anything you liked, nobody seemed to notice. The head of department used to show up to lectures in his slippers and spout absolute twaddle. The students were appealing in the way that kittens and puppies are when they're just beginning to walk; perhaps not nearly as cute, but house-trained in all but the most unfortunate cases. The work was so easy that I thought I must have been missing something. But, no, that was all there was to it: give a few lectures, red-line some scurvy essays, publish some tosh in learned journals, participate in opaque Euro-trough projects and cash your relatively generous pay check. So, I filled up my spare time tormenting research students, writing dull academic papers and consulting very lucratively for fat-cat oilcos. Eventually, I was invited to sit on learned committees and oozed around Whitehall quite a bit. That's really where my story starts, too.

* * *

Lizzie says this writing of mine is exactly the way I talk: rambling and circuitous. She says that if I don't get cutting along smartly with this extremely shaggy dog story, the next Ice Age may have started and the sabre-toothed cats will have to finish it off for me. That isn't too funny, Lizzie. We've got troubles enough as it is. You palaeontologists have no souls, of course. Everyone knows that. You're just sort of scientific undertakers.

* * *

Well, anyway, it was sort of a shame that it all had to end when it did, seeing as I was enjoying myself quite well. I got a good idea of what was happening a lot sooner than most people, as you'll see. Still, even if all you did was read New Scientist every now and then, you had to be an imbecile not to realise that something was about to come unstuck somewhere and PDQ. The public, however, quite naturally preferred to goggle at Page Three. You know, that's one of the few things that I really, deeply miss. Not tits, with the kind of nutrition we're getting you’ve got to be kidding, tits-wise, but newspapers. Newspapers, milk and bread. I can't really say why. The papers, Lizzie; it's certainly not hard to see why we'd want to sink our teeth into a fresh, warm loaf and wash it down with a glass of fresh, cold milk. Of course there's not a lot of trees around these days. I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to make up a one page Sunday newspaper with all the trees left in Britain. I suppose there's not a lot of what you could consider news any more, either. Unless you're really into wind, sand and slow death.

We've got some trees down here with us; sort of tropical ones, too. Yeah, I thought you'd sort of be surprised. They might just be the last of their kind. We've got apple trees, a cocoa plant, a rubber plant and half a dozen little grapefruit trees. The cocoa plant's almost dead, I'm afraid. I got it from one of the botanists at the University. He was doing some experiments for a big chocolate company and needed some business advice. The other trees are going great guns, though. I've got this sort of big, dug-in greenhouse. It doesn't get a lot of light in the winter, but it doesn't blow away, either. And those trees are worth every drop of precious water they use, too, even if some of them don't produce any food. I keep on hoping that the grapefruits might fruit one day. God, can you imagine that, a grapefruit for breakfast - you know, cut across and sprinkled generously with sugar? At least the dwarf apple trees do well enough. We took nearly a hundred pounds of apples from them last year. Nearly an apple a day. Otherwise, we don't try to grow much of our own food, takes too much water.

So how can we live if we don't grow our food? That's easy to answer. I could see what was happening from the government committees I was sitting on and I had a sort of hobby in paranoia. Disaster was staring everyone right smack in the face - we just closed our eyes to it, that's all. After our house blew in for the first time, I started to suspect that our world’s cosy little number might be coming up. Work it out for yourself. In those days, a few thousand quid would buy you a whole lot of food, lovely grub, even if a hundred thousand knickers might not have bought you a big closet in the centre of London. Today, ten tonnes of gold won't buy you a rotten apple core today, but anyone who can live underwater is welcome to all of London for nothing. So I went on this survival craze before it was too late. I stockpiled up enough food and water to last us for maybe fifty years, with good luck and prudent appetites. With our big house, out here in the country, we had plenty of room around to hide our food. We lost some of our supplies when the first really big winds came, but we were lucky. Then we got ourselves and our supplies down into the cellars pretty damn quick.

That food is a deadly secret, of course. We use it only as a last resort. Nothing on earth would be able to keep what few people there are left away from here if they knew there were tons and tons of yummy food stashed up here. So, if you're reading this, you've really got to be a friend. For the rest of the time, like most people, I do a lot of scavenging in the dead towns. Mainly, though, I'm a sort of up-market fix-it man for our local farmers and fishermen. I set up their wind generators and keep them running. I fix their radios. I fixed their TV's until the last satellite station went off the air last year. The Internet packed in almost right away. The telephone still works now and again, amazingly enough. Just for fun, I call numbers at random all over the world. I don't get any replies except from this old geezer in Iceland who can't speak a word of English. Mind you, my Icelandic's not so hot either, so I just say, "Wrong number mate, sorry", and hang up. Still, it is nice to call him now and then; it's nice to know he's still there.

We're not the last people on earth or anything so wildly dramatic like that. I've got a good short-wave radio. One of those dinky little jobs with full coverage of all the bands up to ultra high frequency. Sounds like a lot of the Scandinavians are still going pretty strong. I speak a bit of German, so I can make out a few words, now and then. They don't bother to broadcast in English, of course. They play a lot of music and it all sounds pretty normal there. Something funny's happened to radio reception, though. My theory, I mean guess, is that the ionosphere's totally buggered up. That could have had something to do with the weather change, too.

Lizzie asks, "If you're such a hot-shot, up-market Mr Fix-it, when are we getting our third generator?" The answer, Lizzie, is as soon as the wind drops below fifty. You wouldn't want me to go out there right now, would you? The last anemometer I put out pegged the scale at about 150 miles per hour just as a storm was warming up. It stopped working a few minutes later. I couldn't even find the stump of the post I put it on, let alone any of the pieces. You can figure, though, that if rocks the size of tennis balls, well, little tennis balls, get airborne in the exposed places, then that wind has got to be really moving along at a fairly good clip. I've got this sort of Mickey Mouse pitot tube thing up there on the surface now. It's marked 100 miles per hour as a very rough estimate. All that really means is that I won't be knocked flat by the wind if I have to go out. I still have to worry about getting hit by flying objects, but fortunately there's not too many loose things blowing around any more.

So how fast does the wind blow? I don't know: 250, 300, 350? Your guess is as good as mine, chum. I'll tell you what, though, even down in Antarctica with the Survey, I never saw anything like we've got up there now. And the winds in Antarctica used to hit 200 miles per hour, on occasion, too. In fact, that's just about how I'd describe what it's getting here now: a hot Antarctica with stronger winds. God knows how any plants or animals on the surface survive, but a few things seem to manage. Nothing's very tall, of course, but life keeps on hanging in there, where it gets half a chance.

Yes, well, about Mr Fix-it and generators. Since everyone spends so much of the time underground, we all need light. The wind's a pretty reliable source of power when we need the light most. We don't even need batteries because, once the wind starts, it just blows all the time. I'm pretty good with my hands and at improvising, especially improvising, so I make these wind generators and wire up people's houses. I don't really know if you can really call what we live in houses, any more. There's two schools of thought, as usual: bunkerers and undergrounders. I'm a sort of undergrounder, myself. It's darker underground, but you don't get so much noise. Maybe there's not a hell of a lot in it between the two. I suppose that I just feel a lot safer, six feet under than I do up there on the surface. Even after that nasty Underground business in London. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about that, sooner or later.

So where do we get the raw materials for these generators? Well, there are still millions and millions of cars knocking around out there, of course. We just go down to the car drifts during the calm season and pick out our favourite old models; I’m partial to German, myself. We pull out the electrics we need: lights, wires, alternators and hardware. Plus anything else that looks as if it might be useful some day. I try to keep a couple of dozen full wind generator installations and lots of spares in stock. Making the generator housings and propellers is the real trick. I copied a plan from some books about airplanes I took from the library before that drowned.

The generators work pretty well, but they don't last forever. Remember that I told you I once worked in FMCG? Honestly, there are a lot of technical problems up above. If the generators are too low to the ground, the sand scours them away. If they're up too high, the wind blows them away. A couple of feet can be too high. Car alternators were never intended to work at those sort of speeds, either. To make it worse, the other materials we've got are pretty substandard. We keep on plugging away, though, and we get our light most of the time.

Now most people have two generators, since one's almost certain to pack up during the winds. A third generator's just sort of a sign of upward social mobility. Seriously, though, we can use number three to give the plants some more light and it'll make a backup for our backup. Nobody wants to end up like the Joneses, you know. Their generator packed up during the middle of the winter. It was one Old Man Jones had made himself, fortunately for my reputation. They spent two whole months sitting down there in the dark. La Jones has never been entirely compos mentis after that. Between you and me, some people say she wasn't much upstairs-wise to start with. Nevertheless, that incident has been quite a good stimulus for my little business. After all, I’ve got qualifications, boy-o!

So the locals trade their surplus food, such as that might be, for my estimable services and that's how we live. Plus our food stash. I could well be the last technician left in Wales or maybe even Britain. That's how hard things are. Almost all back to primary producers now. Wouldn't the Hippies and hair-shirts just have loved it? What are we going to do when the cars run out or erode away? Well, I don't really think I really want to think about that right just now, if it's all the same to you.

* * *

Lizzie says this was pretty interesting at first but that all this prattling is getting a bit boring. Must be that nasty academic streak of mine, raising its ugly mixed metaphor. I think I'd better try switching to story-telling style, if I can hack it. I'd hate to lose you now, dear reader, dear friend. There are so few of us left now.

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