Part 22 (2/2)

- You're beautiful, says his friend. I want you for always.

-Well...

- Always.

- Let's have some breakfast. What's the time? Do they serve it yet?

- They serve it whenever you want it, whatever you want.

- That's service.

-Karl?

-What?

- Please stay with me.

-I think I'll just have something simple. Boiled eggs and toast. Christ, can you hear my stomach rumbling?

Karl is fifty-one. Lonely. All as far as he can see the ruins stretch away, some black, some grey, some red, outlined against a cold sky. The world is over.

Karl's friend seizes him by the wrist. The grip hurts Karl, he tries to break free. Karl blinks. The pain swims through him, confusing him.

An old fifty-one. A scrawny fifty-one. And what has he survived for? What right has he had to survive when others have not? There is no justice...

-Karl, you promised me, last night.

- I don't remember much of last night. It was a bit confused, last night, wasn't it?

- Karl! I'm warning you.

Karl smiles, taking an interest in his fine, black body. He turns one of his arms this way and that as the dawn suns.h.i.+ne glints on the rich, s.h.i.+ny skin. - That's nice, he says.

- After all I've done for you, says his friend, almost weeping.

- There's no justice, says Karl. - Or maybe there is a very little. Maybe you have to work hard to manufacture tiny quant.i.ties of justice, the way you get gold by panning for it. Eh?

- There's only desire! His friend hisses through savage, stained teeth. His eyes are bloodshot. - Karl! Karl! Karl!

- You're looking even worse in the daylight, says Karl. - You could do with some breakfast as much as me. Let's order it now. We can talk while we eat.

KARL WILL BE FIFTY-ONE. His mother will have been dead long-since, of cancer. His father will have been dead for eight years, killed in the Wolverhampton riots of 1982. Karl will be unemployed.

He will sit by the shattered window of his front room on the ground floor of the house in Ladbroke Grove, London. He will look out into the festering street. There will be n.o.body there but the rats and the cats. There will be only a handful of other human beings left in London, most of them in Southwark, by the River.

But the wars will be over. It will be peaceful.

Peaceful for Karl, at any rate. Karl will have been a cannibal for two of the years he has been home, having helped in the Destruction of Hong Kong and served as a mercenary in Paris, where he will have gained the taste for human flesh. Anything will be preferable to the rats and the cats. Not that, by this time, he will be hunting his meat himself; he will have lost any wish to kill the few creatures like him who will haunt the diseased ruins of the city.

Karl will brood by the window. He will have secured all other doors and windows against attack, though there will have been no attack up to that time. He will have left the wide window open, since it will command the best view of Ladbroke Grove.

He will have been burning books in the big fireplace to keep himself warm. He will not, any longer, be reading books. They will all depress him too much. He will not, as far as it will be possible, think any more. He will wish to become only a part of whatever it will be that he is part of.

From the corners of his eyes he will see fleeting shadows which he will think are people, perhaps even old friends who will have come, seeking him out. But they will only be shadows. Or perhaps rats. Or cats. But probably only shadows. He will come to think of these shadows in quite an affectionate way. He will see them as the ghosts of his unborn children. He will see them as the women he never loved, the men he never knew.

<script>