For Rosebud

The broken streetlight overhead blinked.

It blinked on, and the crowding brick walls and pavement took on a rain-wet glow. It blinked off, and the night swallowed the street.

It blinked on.

Beneath it, a dirty pool had formed around the grate of the drain. A sheet of newspaper lay trapped in the bars. It unfolded, surrendering to the swell, and its headline was tugged into view.

The doorway to the nearby hotel was in shadow, covered by the striped awning that kept it dry. It would have been easy to think it was an empty space, except for something shiny, at floor level: two patent leather toecaps, side by side, curved like convex lenses. The raindrops bounced on them.

The streetlight blinked off, and the pebbles disappeared. The rain intensified, and time hung unmoving, like the lights glowering over an emptied London.

It blinked on. The toecaps had moved a few inches apart, and one was half-covered by a curtain of black material: a trouser leg. A bald head jerked into the light, as bright as the moon and covered with as many craters. The pockmarks, some small, some large, spread down over the face of the man who looked old but well-kept: his grey eyebrows were groomed; his face was freshly shaved; and the Windsor knot in his tie was pulled up tight under the folds of his hangdog neck.

He pulled a phone, snug and smooth, from the pocket of his raincoat. He flipped it open and pressed the keypad.

"Rosebud," he said. "I'm going to meet him now. Keep safe."

The light blinked off. Footsteps sounded like cymbals in the percussion of raindrops.

The light blinked on to a deserted street. The sheet of newspaper swirled in circles. Then it gave itself over to the pull of the drain, and was gone.

"Chicken pox," Kane said. "When I was a kid. Never thought I'd had it bad when I had hair. Then I got older, started losing the hair, and so I shaved it off – found these pockmarks underneath. Scared the shit out of my wife. View's incredible up here."

He took one hand from his sopping raincoat and gestured at London, laid out beneath him like a butterfly under glass, dead and fragile and beautiful, all at the same time. Then he stared up, through the roof of the capsule, at the night sky and the clusters of kaleidoscopic lights that had become visible the day before yesterday. He hadn't made a decision as to what he thought about them yet. Blind panic had taken everybody else on the planet and somehow passed him by.

"Is she used to it now?" Staff said.

Kane turned to him, still squinting from the lights, and quirked his lips to show he wasn't offended by the question. "She's dead. And no, she never did get used to it. Who would have ever thought this would be the safest place to meet?"

"It was easy to get going. The control booth was open. You'd have thought the last one out of London would have padlocked the Eye. Obviously not on the list of priorities." He laughed, and the fluid motion of the tilt of his head accentuated his youth, and his fear. He was handsome in a boyish way, Kane thought. If this was the end, Staff had been robbed of a good ten years of easy lays before the lifestyle of debauchery took its toll. Kane felt sorry for him.

"Don't be afraid," Kane said on impulse, and Staff flinched, as if a scab had been knocked from a wound. "At least, not of me. I still want to do the deal."

Staff nodded. He was dressed all in black, as if attending a costume ball as a secret agent. He bit his lip as he held out the large rectangular case he carried by its fraying brown strap. "Okay, then let's trade."

"Got some other place to be?"

"What's it to you?"

"I could use some company, that's all. What say we do this the old-fashioned way – have a conversation. Pass the time of day." He gestured at the view, and couldn't help saying, "Watch the world go round. For a while."

"I don't do chit-chat," Staff said, and Kane almost laughed at his fake swagger. He managed to turn it into an indulgent smile instead.

"Try."

"So what did your wife die of?"

Kane sat on the thin white bench and felt the movement of the capsule through his thighs. "TB. Six months ago."

"Oh, right. Sorry."

"That's okay," he said easily. He had become used to discussing it without allowing the still fresh emotions to surface; he simply didn't picture Bella as he said it. He felt less guilty about that than remembering her as an antibiotic-pumped shell.

"Perhaps it's better she went rather than live to see this." Staff gestured at the lights above and the black, empty buildings below.

"That's the kind of thing only the very young say," Kane said. He hadn't meant it as an insult, but Staff seemed to take it that way. His shoulders tightened. He was out of his depth, involved in a deal he didn't understand. It explained the nerves, the bravado. "You know, in all the books about this sort of thing, mankind bands together. They forget their differences. Look for a common solution. Why do you think that hasn't happened?"

Staff shrugged and slid his empty hand from his pocket. "Don't know. Sounds pretty unlikely in the first place. Would have been nice, though."

"Yes." Staff had moved from confused to complacent once more. Kane took a deep breath. He didn't want to hurt him. He had given up that kind of life when he met Bella. "Instead we have a society that's split in two: those that are afraid, and those that are angry. The afraid have fled, or locked their doors and stayed, trembling, under their blankets. The angry have taken the streets, and destroyed anything of beauty they could find."

"They haven't destroyed this." Staff tapped the case he carried.

"No. Can I ask where you got it? You're not my original contact, are you?"

"A friend of a friend." He shrugged. "He didn't think you'd show. Why spend your money on art when the world's about to change?"

"Let's just say money is less of a priority to me."

Staff smiled without humour. "That's a nice position to be in. So what are your priorities? Fun times? The good of humanity? "

"Old fashioned love, I'm afraid." This was not something Kane would ever have chosen to discuss; he was surprised at himself. But here they were, on top of the world. They would never meet again. This time tomorrow they might not even be alive. What harm could a little honesty do? "I've got someone I care about. It's a gift for her, to make up for...mistakes I made in the past. Whatever makes her happy."

Staff lifted the case. "And this will make her happy? She's got expensive tastes."

"Yes," Kane agreed. "She's got class. Not beautiful, but very classy. Beauty – cover girl beauty, I mean – never mattered anyway."

"Maybe it mattered to her."

"You're right." Kane evaluated his companion as the capsule shuddered through the docking platform and then started a slow ascent once more. "I could easily have made her beautiful, but she says a plastic surgeon can't give her what fate decided she shouldn't have." He smiled at the memory.

"So what did you do, to earn all this money? Who were you?"

"Someone who created misery," Kane said softly, crossing his legs and pulling at the creases in his trousers. They had been made by a tailor in Hong Kong; he wondered where that small, precise man with such skill was right now. Maybe locked in his shop, or making a last suit for himself.

"An arms dealer? A politician?"

"I edited a newspaper. One of the newspapers that ran the story that triggered all this. We didn't know what they wanted, the aliens, but we found some crackpots who were willing to predict the worst and ran the story anyway."

Staff laughed. "You think you caused the end of the world? That's what I call an ego. The moment those lights appeared, it was going to happen. Besides, who's to say they're not going to kill us all? Maybe they're the judge and executioner of the universe. God knows we've been asking for it for long enough."

"You think so?" And Kane could see he meant it. He reminded him of himself, when he was young and thought himself invincible. "So what did you do? Before?"

"Worked in a bar. Got the job straight from my GCSEs. My friends used to come there and I'd give them cheap drinks, you know how it is. They didn't have jobs. They were into things, dodgy stuff. I'd listen to them doing their deals, but I didn't want to be like them, nicking mobiles, selling weed.

"Last week, and the lights came, and the papers – your paper – said it was the end of the world, and a few people believed them, and those few were so scared, so sure. The lights didn't move, they didn't change, and soon everyone else started to crack, and they all believed it was the end. I didn't know what to do, so I carried on going to work as usual, hoping my friends would turn up and take me with them, wherever they were going. I watched people run past the window, struggle with suitcases to make it to the tube, crash their cars into each other, scream, cry: it was crazy, crazy.

"Then it went quiet. My friends never came. They never came." Staff swallowed, his attention fixed on the sky through the clear curved plastic of the capsule. Kane watched the jerk of his prominent Adam"s apple. "This man came in to the bar," he said. "He was carrying this case. Not much older than me, but strong, big shoulders, knew how to handle himself. He asked for a drink. Well, he asked for as much drink as he could handle. I would have given it to him for the company, but he was determined to pay. Said he'd never taken something for nothing in his life, and wasn't about to start now. So he told me about you, and the deal you'd set up before the lights came. He thought you wouldn't show, but said if you did, you'd give me something in return for that." He passed the case to Kane, who put it on the floor, against his knee. "Something worth more than money. Something that would change my life forever. So here I am."

Kane smiled. "Waiting for your reward. Very patiently, I might add."

"I can be patient."

The capsule was at the zenith of its orbit once more; they were as close to the lights as it was possible to get. Beneath them, on the other side of the river, smoke was thick, creeping over Whitehall. Something was on fire. Kane realised he was expecting to hear fire engines, maybe screaming. He tried to stop himself from straining to catch sounds that wouldn't come.

"Last week, if I had come here and looked down over London, I would have felt nothing," he mused. "When I was in the Army, before I became a journalist, I saw the worst side of humanity. Wars, famines, murders, rapes, despots – I saw it all, and decided that we're a fucked-up bunch. Pretty much all of us. So I decided not to give to charity. Not to watch appeals on television with huge-eyed orphans or starving children. They would only grow up to be scum like the rest of us, anyway."

Staff sat on the opposite bench and leaned forward, his hands on his knees. "At least you were honest."

"I've always been honest. I've prided myself on that. If we'd met here to do our deal last week, I would have told you without any qualms that all the people who were walking the streets down there, considering takeaway for dinner or rushing for the start of the latest Hollywood bullshit, were no better than ants: not looking at each other, hardly aware of each other's presence, feeling love and hate for reasons they didn't understand.

"I had no respect for the people who bought my paper and bought into my headlines. They had their eyes closed, and I thought they'd never open them and see the truth."

"You were right," Staff said, and Kane had to stop himself from shouting.

"No! Don"t believe that. Not now."

"I see that everyone's run away. To look after themselves. Number one, that's all that matters. We're worse than insects – at least insects would fight to defend their kind."

"We still might. Everything's changed," Kane said, and he realised that was true. He had changed too. "The rules are being rewritten, I promise you. And the fact that there's a man out there who decided he had no use for what I was going to give him is proof of that."

Staff shook his head. The capsule was approaching the docking platform; they had come down from the clouds. "No reward could make that much difference now anyway."

"Here it is," he said. "You can make up your own mind." He reached into his raincoat pocket and pulled out a flat box made of brushed metal, no bigger than his hand. It felt warm to his touch. He leaned forward and held it out to Staff.

"What is it?"

"A weapon."

Staff's hand stopped, his fingertips just touching the box. He met Kane's eyes. "What kind of weapon?"

"Biological. There's a vial attached to a dispersal device. You can look. It's safe in the box."

Kane watched Staff's face as his fascination overcame his fear. He took the case and flipped open the catch. Kane looked away, up to the lights in the sky; he didn't need to see the neat plastic pistol nestling in the blue velvet lining. He had stared at it, considering his decision to trade it, for the past week.

"How does it work?" Staff whispered.

"Simple, I'm told. Just like a gun: you pull the trigger. Fire it into the sky and it'll blanket a square mile. The airborne virus will be inhaled and you'll have an infectious population walking about for three days before symptoms start to show. Death will follow in another seven to ten days. This could destroy a city. Or potentially go global. Of course, once it's released, there's no controlling it, is there? Totally random. A weapon of desperation."

When Kane looked down, Staff had closed the box and placed it on his knees. His hands were in his hair; they were trembling. "Why? Why did the man in the bar – why did he want this?"

Kane shrugged. "I didn't ask."

"You didn't ask? But what if he wanted to – he must be some sort of terrorist -"

"He wanted something badly, obviously. Maybe something political, maybe not. I didn't want to know." He saw the incredulity in Staff's face. "I told you. My wife was dead. I had only one thing that interested me, and I would do anything to get it. I knew the right sort of people to get hold of the item; I contacted them, and didn't think past that."

"You'd give this weapon away for a painting?"

"For what the painting could give me, yes."

"You traded multiple deaths to get laid."

"That's way off the mark." Kane shook his head. "I know it seems bad. Evil. But it's not the worst thing I've ever done, believe me."

Staff stood up and put the case, softly, on the bench. "I don't believe you."

"Let me tell you what the worst thing I ever did is. I was seven. I gave my sister chicken pox."

"I don't find this funny."

"Well, it's true. I walked into her room and breathed on her in her sleep. I wanted to scratch so badly, and I thought spreading the pain around would make it better." He pictured himself, tiptoeing into the dark pink sanctum, past the small chair occupied by a close pack of cuddly toys, over the red skirt and white tights strewn on the floor, to stand by his sister and lower his head to hers. "It was the one truly selfish thing I did. No redeeming side to it. I was thinking only of myself."

Staff picked up the box from the bench. "So giving me this – is an act of altruism, is it?"

"A deal is a deal," Kane said, and he meant it. He had made his peace with it.

The capsule was only a foot from the ground. Staff swung back the door, hopped out and jogged to the control booth. A moment later, the capsule came to a halt on the platform and the trip was over. Kane picked up the rectangular case by its frayed strap and stepped down.

Staff crossed to him and held out the box. "What shall I do with this?" he said.

Kane didn't take it. "That's your decision."

"You could at least throw out some ideas," Staff said, and he had to laugh.

"All right...go home and put it under your pillow, keep it secret, and use the sense of power it gives you to infuse your daily life. Or maybe take it round the corner and use it right now; what difference would it make? The world's screwed anyway. But if I were you..."

"If you were me?"

"I'd wait. See what happens. Maybe the aliens will come down here tomorrow and start to round us up for orderly disposal, and then you'll have an option. Who knows what that stuff will do to them?"

"Who knows," Staff echoed. He sucked in his cheeks and tilted his head to one side. "Right then."

"Right."

"Enjoy your painting. I hope it's worth what you paid for it."

"I hope so, too." Kane watched the young man walk away along the riverside, his pace fast, his head high.

The broken streetlight blinked on.

The man stood in the doorway of the hotel. With one hand he tapped the bottom of the large rectangular case he carried against the shiny toecaps of his shoes; with the other hand he flipped open his mobile phone and pressed a button.

"Rosebud," he said. "I've got it. Come down."

The streetlight blinked off.

Close by, maybe a street away, there were loud calls, laughter, shouting; a group of young men, maybe a mob. Alcohol and mania were audible in their voices. The sound intensified, then began to ebb away.

A door squeaked open. "I'm here," a woman whispered. "Give it to me."

There was a rustle, then a sigh. "Is it okay?" the man said.

The streetlight blinked on.

The woman was past middle age, tall and carrying weight on her hips. She was dressed in grey trousers and a waisted leather jacket. Her bouffant hair was brittle blonde, and her face was thick with make-up that did not disguise the sprinkle of deep pockmarks on her cheeks and chin.

She held up a canvas. Upon it was painted, in swirls of dark green and yellowing white, a vase filled with open, blousy roses. The oil was dense and the brushmarks bold. In the bottom right hand corner there were the black twirls of a famous signature: Vincent.

"It's perfect," the woman said. She knelt down and put the painting back in its case.

The light blinked off.

"We should go," the man said. "The streets aren't safe."

"Is anywhere?"

There was a silence.

"You will come with me now, won't you?" the man said. It was a weary voice, but behind it, hidden in the question, was the insecurity of a little boy who had done wrong and was afraid of punishment. "You do forgive me now, Rosebud?"

"I forgive you. And I'll come with you. Wherever you think we should go."

There were footsteps: fast, neat footsteps, moving away, diminishing, until they could no longer be heard. The streetlight stayed off. It had given up its struggle.

Slowly, gradually, the lights in the sky grew brighter.