Sometime After

1,

At night the two of them sleep in the barge, moored to the buildings of the flooded London. Roe doesn't sleep much. He stands guard over Joseph and watches the older man sleep, and this is peaceful enough that it feels like rest. They are lost. The old capital is a new urban myth. Like some desperate and dying creature it is said to swallow scavengers whole, sucking them down into drains or crushing them with storm surges or poisoning them with toxic waste. Roe has been poisoned. He knows this in a vague and unwilling way. Every time he coughs there is more blood. Every night that he sleeps only makes him more tired. Roe's gradual dying is a badly kept secret between the two of them. Joseph knows. Roe knows that Joseph knows. It is only out of some strange, vital politeness that neither of them ever mentions it.

2,

Roe rises early and cooks a tin of tomato soup on the burner. As he waits for it to heat he spits through the port into the water and a red clot curls out of sight on thick, dark tail. He rubs his chest. He takes the soup from the burner and hurts his fingers. More careful now he wraps the tin in a cloth to drink his half. Roe cannot manage much food anymore. He leaves what remains for Joseph, who has woken and is praying. Roe goes out on deck again. Some way off the towers and pylons of the submerged financial district are clearly visible. He looks out for things. It is early in the morning when anything seems possible. He has heard stories from other scavengers about underwater ghosts, gilled humans, mermaids; about great oil slicks leached from drowned cars that lie on the surface and burn for months at a time. Roe has seen none of these new wonders for himself, and this morning is no exception. There is only the city, brooding there absurdly like a collection of teeth.

3,

They are spotted. At first Roe thinks the other boat has missed sight of them, but then it heels, sloshes round into its own bow wave and makes for them. They cannot outrun it. Roe signs to Joseph, who cuts the engine. The two men go and stand on the bow, the barge idling down to nothing in the water. Mirroring them on the approaching craft is a man in a respirator mask. They cannot see his face. Roe is afraid. Roe often feels that it is his responsibility to be afraid for the two of them, because Joseph never is. They watch the boat approach and when it is within shouting distance it too idles. The man on the prow pulls off his mask, reveals a shining, round kind of face, topped with a sweaty mess of curly hair. The two boats hover a little way apart. Roe needs to cough, but he holds it back. Other men are emerging from the speedboat, all in masks, all wary.

After a minute of silent appraisal the man on the prow shouts across to them, "Either of you a doctor?" Something inside Roe seems to unclench. He can tell by the man's voice that he is not a threat. It is instinct. They are safe.

Joseph shouts back, "I was a dentist, once."

The man laughs unhappily. He signs to his colleagues and the boat hauls round in the water and chops away. When they are gone from sight Roe puts his hands on his knees and coughs and coughs and coughs.

4,

Later they come into some kind of business district. Roe cuts the engine and stands at the bow while Joseph consults the maps. The buildings are still half-tall all around them, their silent faces, vertical and square as ice cube moulds. There are tide marks on some of them, grey-brown-green-red swathes where the water has risen and fallen and left patches of damp, weed or rust. He can hear the slap of water and gulls calling. They freewheel far above, the size of dogs, newly dominant. Roe watches them warily. Wildlife is not the only danger. Sailing in the flooded zones is always uneasy. Things lurk below the surface: buildings or cars, all jumbled and forming into rock formations as erosion and deposition go to work. Drains too--particularly in London--are troublesome. The network of hollow spaces is so fantastically complex that it might as well be an organism. Tunnels block and unblock. Air pockets shift. Whirlpools, fountains. The possibility of ruptured gas mains, toxic waste, sewage, pesticides . . .

Roe joins Joseph in the cabin and together they study the map. It is an old Ordnance Survey, covered over with shading and scribbles of red marker pen. The scribbles depict the things they have found in their various travels: safe havens or dangerous sinkholes; places to return to; hidden caches of food. The tides are also marked, but more tentatively in pencil. Looking down at it, Roe feels like a god whose plans have gone terribly wrong.

5,

They draw up to the building and circle slow until they find a broken window. Roe puts on a mask and goggles, swims across and heaves himself up into the damp interior of what must be the fifth or sixth floor. Joseph throws the rope and Roe ties the barge up to a window strut. Then he helps Joseph to make the short leap across; the older man is less agile now than he was once. The room they are in is open plan. It stinks of rot. The walls peel and are fusty with yellow insulation foam. Rotting carpets are layered with masses of rotted paper, mould, black colonies of moist fungus. The sunken cakes that were once easy chairs. The floor feels squashy and uncertain.

They swish their way across to the far end of the flat. It is dark inside--the windows obscured by dirt and fungus--but their eyes adjust. They find out into the corridor, then down to the stairwell. The air inside is so powerfully bitter that Roe can taste it through his respirator. The water that glistens half a flight down is black, the stairs themselves coated in slime.

"Further up," says Roe, glancing at a sign on the wall. "Sixth floor."

Roe's heart is beating very fast. He feels dizzy. It seems like centuries rather than years ago that this place was his home.

6,

Roe remembers very little of the actual floods. He was a roofer. There were lots of roofers. You could look across the gap between buildings as though it were a canyon, wave to people on the other side, shout messages across in the night. See them--your fellow lost souls--but not reach them. You would shout though: rescue is coming, food is coming, clean water, some sanity to the world.

Joseph had been there. In those early days Joseph had prayed a lot, slept a lot. They had raided through half sunken flats and found pot to smoke while they waited, shade-crawling in the lee of the chimney block, hands cracked by salt and wetness and wear. Tired and dry and waiting. Just days of it. Waiting and waiting. They had played cards and made Molotov cocktails. Later, finding themselves unthreatened by looting gangs, they had drunk the cocktails. Roe had started praying simply to have something to do.

And then the copters came and took them away, and it emerged that the world was changed--not just for months this time--forever. They'd been housed in a community centre for seven days until one morning Joseph had shaken him awake to say, "I know a guy. He can get us a boat."

7,

Stupidly, Roe tries his apartment key. The lock is rusted. This floor was submerged at one time. Maybe several times. Maybe never; the damp on the walls and the floor could just be creep. When the key doesn't work he busts the door open by kicking it. It is not difficult. The wood is just loose pulp now. They move inside, blink in the yellowish dark until their eyes adjust. The walls are mottled. The carpet slides in loose folds across the floorboards. In the kitchen Roe sees great bulbs of fungus clinging to the ceiling. Rust on everything metal, green fur on everything wood. Roe realises how pointless it was to return here; anything he might have wanted to salvage is beyond repair, any memories he might resurrect will be shrouded by mould. It is sickening. He has dragged Joseph halfway across London for this.

He tries the bedroom. The bed is gone. Things crawl on the floor. Joseph looks politely around as though he is flat hunting. Cold drips on the back of Roe's neck. He tries the cupboard, and the door slides wetly off the hinges. He is hoping for a notebook or a photograph, but inside the cupboard is just a slumped, fungal mess. Foolish really, he thinks, the way they make the most important things out of paper.

8,

They go up to the roof. It is too late to leave tonight. They start a fire from some dry wood they had stowed on the barge. Joseph feeds it. It is getting darker. He prays and checks his watch and prays some more. Roe wanders around a bit, takes the view on every side, and on every side it is the same. The place is familiar, to a degree, but Roe feels that he has outgrown the part of his life he spent waiting here. He has changed. Joseph has changed.

A stray wind slops a trail of smoke in his direction. Roe catches some of it, doubles over coughing, red splotches spitting down onto the roof. It is worse than it has been before. Every time is worse now. When he recovers he is vaguely surprised to find that he is on his knees. The head on his shoulders does not feel entirely his own. He stands and goes unsteadily to sit with Joseph.

The two of them do not talk much. It has become a habit not to think about the future.

9,

They have some vodka. It is in the boat. Roe goes down four floors to get it and while he is gone Joseph prays and feeds the fire. They found the bottle floating in the low mess of trash that gathers at the edges of the exclusion zone. They dipped it towards them with a pole and fished it out and saw that it was sealed. They had put it aside and now they want to drink it. Roe comes back. He opens the bottle. The lid rasps and the metal ring clinks against the neck.

"You first." He holds it out to Joseph, who takes it and drinks and then passes it back. Roe takes a swallow. He grimaces--he had forgotten what drink really tasted like. He says, "We shouldn't have come back." It is something he has been thinking for the past few hours, ever since he stood in the wreck of his bedroom and realised that everything worth saving was beyond all rescue. "I'm sorry I made you come."

Joseph takes the bottle and drinks and says, "You didn't. Don't be. It gave me something to do."

Roe is certain that he will die tonight, or some night soon. He wants to tell Joseph this, but to do so seems horribly unfair on the older man. He is worried about what Joseph will do once he is gone. He has the feeling that if he were to die tonight then Joseph would die too. To Roe, this seems like the most logical thing in the world.

10,

From the vodka Roe feels light-headed and warm and clean inside. He passes the bottle to Joseph who holds it without drinking until Roe takes it back. The city fades out of sight beyond their little fire. They stay and huddle and drink and are silent. Things call in the night. The water sloshes against the walls of the building and the building creaks and squeaks and settles. Roe can feel sleep approaching, the dreamless, easy kind--the variety of sleep that is not sought but comes upon you, irresistible and final as chloroform.

"Look," says Joseph. His voice is concerned. Roe does not want to look. He is tired beyond reason. Tired beyond tiredness. Joseph is insistent, "Look, out there."

Roe rouses himself and stands. He drinks what remains of the vodka and the taste draws him abruptly into wakefulness. He stands by the cliff-edge of the roof with Joseph, supported by Joseph, the heat of the fire on his back. Looking out into the city is like looking into an empty sky, so pitch dark you'd never know that buildings were there if you hadn't seen them. Except for one place. A light is floating on the water. How far out it is impossible to tell, but there is a light. It is steady, bright white, unflickering and quite unnatural.

"What do you think?" says Joseph.

Roe says, "I don't know."

They watch it for a little longer and then Roe raises his hand and waves and shouts, "Hey. Hey, over here." And Joseph does too. The voices echo. They both wave and shout, until the light begins to drift towards them. They stop waving and Roe leans on Joseph and waits. He feels giddy. He knows he is sick, but he does not feel sick. He knows a lot of things, suddenly, but not how to say them. The source of the light threads towards the two men. Soon enough, it should come into view.

Krishan Coupland is a student from Southampton. Nothing interesting ever happens to him. His website is: www.krishancoupland.co.uk.