A Box Full of Cats
A.R. Goodheart
"We cannot manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as 'real' or 'only possible.'"
- Erwin Schrödinger
Part I:
Five Days Left
CHAPTER 1
The body was spread across the edge of the road, a hand draped against the forehead, the legs ribboning balletically over one another, rain thrumming upon its curves and lengths. There was no spray or ebb of blood, save for a thimble's spatter on the forehead of no obvious origin. Paul Everett stood over it and pulled his left palm over his face, dragging wet skin over the bones beneath and drawing a sigh for the wrinkles and their increasing slack. A sallow film had become of integument. Chalk had replaced iron. There was a frailty to each contour now that he hated. Age, eroding into his features, had robbed him of vigour. Of sharpness of mind. It had reversed the swell of his chest from an ivory cage to a shrill mesh just as ruthlessly as it had dissolved the cartilage between his joints. The hide of his fingers resembled chalk rubbings on sticks and nothing more – nothing to denote a life lived in anything other than shallow bones. Though he was just about alive, which was more than could be said for the thing lying at his feet.
He had moved towards the corpse in a circular path, sweeping around it as one would approach a dangerous animal – as though he were half expecting it to spring back to life. The dry thud and the cracking of windshield glass repeated on him, bouncing around the caverns of his mind and stirring a slight anger – an indifferent flavour of annoyance. So he did not arch down towards the man's neck to check for a pulse. Nor did he shed a tear over the shock. Nor did he lament the sudden loss of life. He simply kicked the corpse, connecting his left foot square against the man's gut as hard as he could.
"Why have you done this?" he asked, the words scraping against themselves, clumping to a dull nothingness under the weight of the torrential rain. "Why?" They were the first words he'd said aloud for many weeks, though their message sailed no further than his own breath. "Why did you do this?" He asked again, and gave the corpse another rigid punt.
***
An hour prior there had been no bones denting Paul's car bonnet. No envy or confused irritation. No grievance. There had only been a photograph taped to the upper corner of a canvas – the view from the Dover cliffs. The camera pointed outwards at the Channel, catching a silhouetted figure standing on the hill's apex. He had painted this scene before, a long time ago, but something final and meaningless had happened to that copy that he could no longer remember. A lingering nostalgia now compelled him to summon it and all the others to life again from fresh paint. He would soon be leaving the house for good, and leave the paintings behind with it, but he wanted to finish straightening the sea out against the sky. Only, the watercolours kept running, his hands shaking in arrhythmic pulses, and the sea level rose up with every attempt.
He drew away from it slightly, straightening his back, and slid the hide of his index finger left and right across the bone with the opposing thumb. It bunched and flopped like rubber bands rolled over a pencil. The wind, bandied by the heady morning rain, was smearing itself against the room's only window in waved rounds. The former pushed the latter against the glass, then away, then back, then away, and every time it happened it was distracting. Maddening almost. And it was brighter than it ought to have been outside, though Paul could not find warmth for trying. The glass and its frame sat together uneasily; heat leaking from inside and sound from beyond, the brittle drumming relentless, the water's patters agitating the fibres of his inner ear like brushes against the grain. It would otherwise have been silent, he knew, and the silence normally on offer was near godly in its absoluteness.
He had lived a remote life of late, which, storms notwithstanding, gifted a predictable stillness. He craved this. It gave the mind ample time to think about things. More time than he needed, perhaps, but certainly as much as he wanted. Accordingly, he had become monkish in his isolation and devout in his minimalism, owning only a car's worth of material goods and focusing his routines on only a few of them. He would listen to the wavering pitch of an old tape player while he painted, or he would watch cracks in the wall develop while a bottle of Rioja was sunk, and that was mostly it. There were several completed works in his modest art studio now, the oil on them still tacky to the touch. To that room's right was stark kitchen, then a dark bedroom and a perpetually-freezing bathroom, and some other empty rooms on the ground floor with doors he could not open. There were more material things on the first floor, and there were many more bedrooms there also, but he hadn't felt the desire to climb the flight of stairs needed to reach them since his last fall. So for almost a year his existence had been as spartan as possible, and that was fine enough because Paul now considered it only that: an existence. A waiting game. Unopened moving boxes clung to the hallway skirting boards, cloaked in sheets of dust like mist above so much swamp water.
He painted for an hour. Then, finished to a displeasing extent, he packed a small leather suitcase with sundries, a dry sandwich and a single fold of paper adorned in scribbles. He palmed his walking stick by the crook and stood inside the front door waiting motionless for the rain to abate, which it chose not to. The walk to the car would only be 15 yards, but making it there in such harsh weather and at Paul's pace would be horrible. Ten minutes went by in which the downpour neither lessened or worsened so he resolved to make his move regardless, gripping tightly onto the suitcase handle, spinning the doorknob and facing the outside with a grimace, stepping into the bleakness of it, pushing the door backwards behind him until he heard it kiss the frame, not bothering to lock it. He would not return.
The house and its surrounding buildings were over 100 years old, with masonry peeling and fallen roof tiles embedded into the wet mud below, the plot pitched hobbling distance from the shore at the very northwest of the Isle of Skye, on the very northwest tip of Scotland. It had been in his family for several generations, though he'd never met any relatives with Scottish blood in their veins and Paul, with a perennial lack of interest in his bloodline, had opted never to ask about whatever historic wrongdoing had first landed it in Everett custody. Nor why it had been kept but not lived in for so long, though he thought that may have been down to its inaccessibility more than anything: the only road to and from it was an arid vein carved into steep hills, which trundled the island's west coast, marred only sporadically with other crumbling brick buildings and farmland. It was a barren stretch, though that seemed apt, and it meant that there were no real neighbours to speak of; no other house for three miles in any direction. Every settlement on the island was kept apart from the next by at least that distance – seemingly purposefully. Moreover, nearly everyone in the area was introverted, entirely alone, and kept themselves religiously to themselves. Paul had been living there for just under a year and had only ever interacted with two other people: one man in his forties who had all but run from Paul's gaze and one elderly woman called Jan, or Pam, or something to that effect, who had held tightly to the knuckle of Paul's elbow as though he were a child, and had suggested with some dalliance that they should visit the nearby cafe together one morning, and who had brought the rank taste of bile to his mouth with her choice of words and way of being. But she had been the exception rather than the rule.
He shook her image free and heaved his left leg forward through the tumbling rain, swinging his artificial right round in an arc after it while placing his walking stick down ahead of himself. It normally took exactly 17 of these awkward strides to get from the door to the car. This time it took 20. He arrived under the musty shelter of the garage, already dripping, and yanked a protective sheet from the car with thumb and forefinger, flicking it away with his stick and letting it settle in a heap off to the side. Then he scratched the key at the chrome around the edge of the slot, further marking its dull sheen. Too much haste, he told himself. Too little control. He could now only keep his hands still enough to paint, and in broad, impressionist strokes at best – absolutely everything else would send him into a series of fast shakes that he could seldom influence. Painting was enjoyable, though, whereas everything else was exacerbating; whenever he tried to consciously slow his fingers enough for any other granular task they would only grow worse, and faster. And so it took him a while to introduce the key to the lock, and it was a lengthier effort still to get inside. He flung his suitcase and walking stick across to the passenger seat as he sat down, grumbling and aching and smashing his eyelids shut to their sills. It was difficult and tiring, and he was already sodden from the rain.
Paul then took a moment – as he always would – to sit still, pull in a barrel of air and tighten his hands around the steering wheel's leather. He flexed his wrists, feeling it rub against his palms and along the lengths of his fingers, its strands groaning and stretching in the way only real calfskin can. He had wanted this exact model of Aston Martin – a 1963 DB5 – for as long as he could remember wanting anything, and its childish grasp on him had ended up costing almost as much as the sale price of his last his house, though that outlay felt worthwhile when genuine leather passed through his hands. The dashboard was all wood and grain, the trim stitched together from panels of creamy hide. And it was, as he'd been proudly told, likely to be the only Aston Martin DB5 in the world modified to be driven via hand control. He enjoyed that. At some considerable expense the car's pedals had been rerouted, transformed into an array of simplified paddles behind the steering wheel. A cylindrical bar protruding from the right needed to be pulled outwards and held in line with the wheel to increase the speed, while pushing it away acted as the brake. The clutch had been removed and the gearbox changed to a semi-automatic shifter, which meant that Paul's left leg and artificial right could both spread out, unoccupied. A retrofitted power-steering system, replete with matching leather spinner knob at the wheel's two o'clock position, made it easy enough for him to steer the car with one hand where necessary. This way Paul could drive without compromise or outside help, and to him that was worth all the money he had and some of the money he didn't. Not a lot else in his life was as selflessly enjoyable; the car had been one of life's few constants. It had never broken down.
A roar echoed around the open garage. Explosive vibrations and bombastic chords struck against boxes and tools, displacing the air with a tide of fumes as the car pulled out onto the road, a glimmer of silver in contrast to the crudity of the path beneath it. But it lingered and loitered, pouring itself free from the door like soap from the bottle rather than bolting loose. Paul had never been a fast driver. Moreover, he'd not felt eager to get anywhere for a long time, today being no exception, and he had certainly not bought the car for its archaic attempts at speed. Instead he'd bought it because being inside it was a luxury. It was an escape from his own rigid frame – a luxe hotel in which he could be quiet and still; a stay away from everything it means to own and operate a home and a body. Its tyres made vinyl scratches as they rolled onto the grit outside – the opening beats of Paul's favourite record. They oozed along the driveway and around the corner, turning until his house disappeared from the rear-view mirror, erased by windswept bracken and hills and the pleasant nothingness beyond.
Skye's few roads were ancient and always empty. Laced among mountains and over brooks, they would follow the coast before veering inwards, losing themselves in valleys. They spiralled up to snowy peaks and down to rocky moonscapes. On occasional drives Paul might encounter another car, and be forced in especially narrow stretches to pull to the edge of a sheer drop to allow the opposing motorist to pass. But today there was no such activity. He allowed the Aston to pitch itself around blind corners without care or coercion, the wheels rolling through existing treads in the medieval rock like butter melting into warm bread.
There were two ways to reach the mainland. Once the initial stretch had been done, the choice was either to drive straight through the heart of the island or fork right and take a thousand-year-old trail, one which offered stunning views of the west coast before climbing the winding hills of a veritable alp. Either route would end at the same place; each bled down through the west side of Scotland towards Glasgow and then on to England below, but the latter course would add at least an hour to Paul's journey. At the point of choosing the heavy rain cleared to a light drizzle, the weather urging Paul to enjoy the longer way south. And it was a sign that didn't go unnoticed; he needed very little convincing.
The coastal road was even more ribbonlike than anything prior – a wayward hair cut by horse and cart and necessity rather than by modernity and notions of comfort. It was rough, and in several places dangerously slight. Hand-drawn signs warned of falling boulders – of the potential for driving clean off the edge and through the crests of the North Atlantic surf. In colder months it was an impossible stretch to navigate, but in April, wet as it was, the route was just about feasible. Paul sailed around blind corners so sharp and blunt that he could neither remember nor guess the direction in which the road would continue on the other side. His reactions were poor and his eyesight lacking, but the beauty all about him was enough to silence any tingles of fear. If ancient men fought and died on this road – fending off bandits or forcing invaders back – then he believed he could afford to do the same. It would, he thought, be a very brilliant death: flying over the edge of a mountain, rolling into a fiery thunder, tearing down the canyon and eventually merging with the tumbling rocks and frozen grass, or simply slipping quietly into the cold neutrality of the sea. It would be far easier than to live long enough to get where he was going.
But any such accident seemed to be avoiding his course, until then, just as blankness began to settle in Paul's mind as would layered snowfall on the roadside, a figure materialised in the distance. A man shrouded in luminous nylon was sitting at the side of the road, his head in his knees, the rain crushing him from above. It was an odd sight for such remote parts, though Paul gave the man he was about to kill no more than a nanosecond of thought before drifting back into his mental void. The figure was probably out for a jog, he thought. Probably having a moment's rest. But as the Aston closed the gap the man brought himself to his feet and climbed from the rock he was perched on down to street level. Perhaps he was seeking a lift? He wouldn't get one, Paul decided. The car drew closer and closer and then, with less than a blink's time to spare, the tracksuited man walked calmly out in front of the car's path and collided with its front edge, breaking in half across the bonnet, splintering the windshield and bouncing over the roof.
A good number of his bones were shattered on impact. His Pelvis broke into fragments as the sacroiliac joint and right ilium were pushed round and into themselves, until one was forced to snap from the other like bent chalk. This happened at the speed of a rifle shot and Paul heard the resulting crack from the driver's seat even above all the other gruesome sounds, and the rain, and the breaking of glass. On landing, a rib pushed itself through the fleshy outers of the man's right lung, piercing it with an inaudible gulp and allowing blood to stream in as though a plug had been pulled from a full sink. The man felt nothing but a white clap to the mind and a millisecond of reprieve, however, and then he felt nothing evermore. His brain had been compressed by his own skull, which had thumped inwards on itself by the car's A-frame. It had been easy.
Paul did not bite down on the brakes because he did not have the faculties to do so; his eventual reactions were so that the car had rolled over fifty feet before stopping, the rain producing more of a snarl than the brake pads ever did. He took his hands from the wheel and pushed at the door, then stepped calmly out of the vehicle and onto the road, using a hand as an umbrella while he reached for his walking stick. It was strange; there was a tranquility to his actions; an instant numbness. He saw himself exit the car as though he were watching on a screen, distanced from the stress of it. He possessed the agency of a man who had heard an irksome noise coming from the exhaust, or who had suspicions of a broken tail light.
Back a way, half on and half off the road, the dead man's twisted extremities were catching pools of rainwater in their various dents and pockets. Paul drew level and examined the paleness of his skin, finding it otherworldly rather than dreadful. He had been close to death on several occasions before – his experiences ranging from the tragic to the interesting – although never in such extreme isolation. And despite all of its oddness he and the facts of the thing were able to reconcile quickly: there was no helping the man. That was clear enough; he was plainly dead, the eyes having rolled up to the skull and the colour in the cheeks having faded to slate grey.
"Why have you done this?" he asked. He looked a young man to Paul. Though clearly in his late forties, the brow and neck seemed impossibly fresh – untarnished by the stress and worry that only later life is capable of doling out. "Why? Why did you do this?" he repeated glumly, and he felt compelled to kick the corpse to send the question home.
His foot struck the abdomen, causing the body to wobble only slightly, then settle, then emit an empty sort of wheeze from somewhere other than the man's face. The sound pushed against the lining of the nylon tracksuit as would air from a deflating mattress. He kicked it again, unsure why. Maybe it was to try and elicit a response from his own mind other than gross apathy, though no such feeling arose in Paul's chest – only new questions. Had he been driving too absently? No, surely, since he had spotted the man's colourful tracksuit from some way off. He turned the verity of it over in his mind until he felt happy that the man must have sought his own death, else why would he have walked so stoically into Paul's path? And why would he have died without so much as a sound in protest? And if that was the case, then what care was it of Paul's? Why feel remorse over doing the guy a favour, he wondered? And, given what the end of his journey would entail, how much to really care at all? Paul Everett peered down at the physical remains of the life he had just extinguished and was jealous. He felt an acute sense of envy over the corpse's ability to experience what no living man could: meaninglessness. Freedom from the burdens of loneliness and an active mind. And then, after a few moments, that envy began to settle and simmer until he felt only the familiarity of mild annoyance, so he returned slowly to the car, leaving the body exactly as it was and resolving to think no more of it. "Well I hope you're happy," he said. The car began again and he continued on his way. It would not be the last person he would see die in such a senseless fashion.
***
An hour or so later, after passing the backs of several signs that he knew read 'Unsafe' and 'Danger of ice', Paul joined the straighter, more deliberate road south, dismayed more about his inability to die in the face of danger and poor vision than about the man whom he had recently rendered deceased – he could barely see through the crack in the windscreen, which he had only watched widen like tree roots over the latter course of his journey. Soon the jarring sensation of hard rubber over stone stopped abruptly, replaced by the numbness of tarmac; the car sped up against Paul's wishes and he woke from a state of tantra. If the serpentine landscapes and fractured glass had flushed his mind of thoughts, it was only to make way for a fresh tide of them upon returning to the modern world. And as it often did, his brain clogged with blurry pictures of one person. His torso hollowed out at how fiercely he missed the sight of her. He became wrapped up in sinuous thoughts. They thumped so vividly against the sides of him that he drove for almost 100 miles – for nearly two hours – in obliviousness to the complete lack of traffic. He had not expected to see any throughout Skye, but now that he was across the bridge and onto the mainland proper he had driven along dual carriageways and main roads for some time without encountering another living thing. And though his right arm and the tips of his fingers subliminally acknowledged the extra space, squeezing on the accelerator paddle without his prompting, the solitude wasn't something Paul was consciously aware of for some time.
But finally he grew suspicious. His tendrils fumbled for the car radio, unable to recall if any of its blank buttons and switches pertained to a traffic report function. If some accident or other was causing the road he was on to stay silent, he thought it wise to actively avoid merging onto anything that would end his seamless run. The radio had no display, just a red analogue marker that sped left and right along a horizontal line as he tuned the dial, all slotted into a mahogany bezel, and with frequencies above and below printed so finely that they looked to Paul more like flecks of dirt than numbers. His eyes darted down to the marker and back at the road as he twisted the dial trying to pick up a signal, swerving slightly across the lines as he went. His glance flew down and up, down and up, again and again, scolding the marker and apologising to the road. Nothing. He slowed, easing the knob round as if cracking a safe, looking down to the marker and back at the road once again. Only static returned. He turned it in the opposite direction, looked down at the marker and back up. Nothing met him but the mumbled thudding of tyres over raised paint and the whispering of a faint hiss. He wondered if the oaf who'd stepped in front of him had snapped the aerial. And then, after one last turn, he caught a glimmer of a voice as the line glided through a correct frequency. He spun it back and settled on what he thought might have been BBC Radio 4, though he did not recognise the voice bellowing out. It was deep, and calm, but stretched – as though its owner were failing to hide dismay. He caught the last half of the last few words before a repeating pattern of beeps started in their place. This uniform beeping continued for a few moments before the voice began to speak again:
"This is an emergency message from the BBC on behalf of Downing Street and the Emergencies and Disaster Management Committee," it said, the words sliding on a lump of regret. "As per the Crisis Preparedness Bill of 1977, all available radio and television signals have been commandeered by the EDMC. This message was first broadcast on April 12th at 7:15pm across all channels, at which point our best estimates say there are six days left until-."
There then followed many esoteric details – a pompous collection of academic terms. There was an explanation of a 'large-scale event'; a list of things to do and things not to do; damning confirmation of the hopelessness of it all. But Paul didn't truly understand the meaning of any of it, and he wished that his wife was there to explain. Then the message ended sharply, the way it had before:
"Please stay indoors, stay safe, and await further news."
The beeps started again as they had done before, though Paul's clicking synapses more than drowned them out. His head was alive with electricity – more active than it had been in a year. 'Six days', he thought. Or six days yesterday; there would only be five now, he realised. Five days left of it. The corner of his mouth turned up. He held the Aston steady, long enough without flinching or slowing to hear the same message and its intermittent beeps a further four times before he finally turned it off and pulled to a rolling stop in the middle of the deserted carriageway. Rainwater still rapped against the windscreen, never slacking and never in time. It was the end. The end of the entire world. The end of it all. Paul tried and failed to grasp what that meant, travelling through several mental avenues that all came to dead ends and settling only on one toneless realisation: he had survived long enough to see it go. Something selfish in him basked in the relief that he would finally know his own death, that he could not have timed his journey better, and that he would not be going through it alone.
The pistons shook back into life as he squeezed his fingers around the paddle, easing the car back into a middling pace. Before long he was into the outskirts of Glasgow, where then, from no distinct point of origin, a regular flow of traffic emerged like dividing cells. This continued for miles; the mass of vehicles expanding in both directions, slowing his progress to a crawl. Curiously, most people were abiding by the rules of the road, though busier intersections screeched with an underlying lack of order. These hubs turned the grey stillness of Scotland into the honking, bustling centre of Delhi. Kerbs were mounted and signs knocked over. People in bigger cars – the 4X4s and SUVs – did anything they could to speed themselves to wherever they were going. Paul saw a police car caught in the anarchic mix, although its panicked driver was not in uniform. The car sat and revved angrily in a queue that built up around a stacked junction, siren off, waiting its turn with the others and completely ignoring those who broke the law to get ahead, the driver dabbing at a bloody gash on the top of his head, panicking at his stationarity. It was a curious sight. Sallow horns blazed from every angle.
Paul's Aston was low to the ground with a clearance of only several inches and a windscreen now held together only by hairs, so he was not about to begin mounting kerbs. He wasn't prepared to do anything stupid or out of the ordinary in case he became stuck. Luckily, in spite of the news, and despite the minority's vehemence in subverting the rules of the road, there remained a majority of calm drivers. People were wanting of the system's order, and ensuring with their conformity that things just about worked as they were designed to. That mentality provided movement, while exigent motives freed up the motorways through speed alone.
The glimpses Paul earned of other drivers revealed no average demographic or age, just a common sense of desperation. He could feel the collective frustration like a hot sweat each time the flow of cars crawled to a halt, everyone brought to the verge of tears over the wasted seconds and minutes of their final days. It was such precious time now, he thought, all of it being clouded in a void of smog and exhaust fumes. It was all too depressing, and he found himself unable to focus on any of his melancholic conclusions for too long. A filter began acting within his brain, shutting sections off when the signals became too much to bear. Each time he got bogged down with contemplating the practicalities of a world destroyed, something inside him killed his train of thought.
This was especially true on the few occasions that he passed the crumpled results of a crash. The first was somewhere near Birmingham, but there were several more thereafter, each clearly borne of a sickly marriage of fluctuating rain and absence of care. A couple stood in each others' arms, smoky and tearful, beside the shell of a hatchback. Whichever vehicle had caused the crash was no longer at the scene, and nobody had stopped to help them, Paul included. And why should he? He knew from experience that no one would do the same for him. He only slowed slightly because he was forced to, the traffic easing to allow each driver to rubberneck and gawk. And again, the very second he tried to imagine where the couple were going, and why, his brain stopped him. It was either self-preservation or selfishness, or the fact that they were two halves of the same instinctive need, but his mind and his gut told him that the crying couple were not his concern; he pulled his gaze from them, back to the road, and that would have been that were it not that there were many others lying in wait. A mangled SUV had torn forcefully through the central reservation, its owner's legs dangling out of the door, head in hands, unmoving. There was a coach too, which had flipped onto its side and caused the motorway to funnel into one lane somewhere near Luton. And then, much closer to the M25 and London, some of the features of an old Austin Mini, barely visible, poking out from behind a wall of billowing smoke and fire. As with the others, Paul's mind barred him from imagining what had happened, or if the car's occupants would still even resemble human bodies. He stared at an imaginary dot fixed in the distance straight ahead and drove directly to it, because that was all he could do.
By the onset of early evening he was finally able to leave the limbo-esque stretch of motorway. A purple husk licked at the grey corners of the sky, chasing the lighter clouds into the opposite end of the horizon. Paul eased the Aston off of the M25 via an empty junction and onto St Albans Road, which fed into North London near the suburban outcrop of High Barnet. It was greener here than anything he had seen for the last hour or so – London running out of urban energy at its northern tip, its brick and tarmac spilling over into fields before succumbing to grass, trees and bushes. Hills, and something almost like the countryside, unravelled to the north in a direction separate from which he had travelled. This quieter part of the city perched high above everything inside it, its valleyed topography keeping the central hub locked to the south. Paul had always believed that the shape of it made for an area lined with stunning views, which was part of the reason he had lived near there for much of his life. The pang of fond memories kicked him sharply in the back of the head, forcing him to swallow down melancholy and cough the resulting daydreams free; they did him no good and their presence in him felt useless.
Paul's was, once again, the only car on the road, gliding slowly southwards along a lane walled on both sides with thick trees. And it was here that the Aston stopped. He had been foolish in his stupor, not noticing the fuel light blinking furiously at him – he had not thought about petrol at all, in fact. He'd not detected the burning smell filtering through the vents from the engine, nor the hollowness of its rumble. The pistons had sucked at the dregs smeared against the insides of the tank, found nothing but fumes and died with a sad whimper. The power ebbed away, and though Paul tugged hard at the accelerator paddle nothing came back from beyond the dashboard. Everything sank to a worrying hush and the Aston's progress rolled towards a premature end. He manoeuvred it to the near side of the road, bolted up the kerb with one wheel going nearly 20 miles-per-hour and was whipped sharply forwards and back in his seat. The coils in his neck ground on each other, powdered chalk striking against the surrounding nerves, then he sat still, one hand hanging from the leather steering knob and the other on the paddle.
He was still the only person there, motionless on a quiet road that dripped its way between two separate golf courses. Through the trees to his right he could see a plane of dark green, upon which several red flag poles bowed in the dull wind. He wondered if he had played on one of the two courses as a younger man, and he became lost in trying to remember every round of golf he had ever played, and to which decade of his life they each belonged. It was a complex request to ask of an ageing mind, and all that returned was a fuzzy image of playing a difficult shot out from the edge of a lake. But that could have been just about anywhere, at just about any time. It may not even have been him, but rather an image from a film or a photograph. Trying to access the correct memories had become a harder and harder task over the last few years, and especially so over the last 12 months. But it wasn't as though he were losing them outright – more that things jumped about more often in his mind. The network of convulsing roads that formed each cognisance would jumble, spontaneously uprooting themselves and moving to a different time or place. His sense of duration was completely off. He had epic, endless memories for events that had only taken half an hour, but only snippets of flashes of half-glimpsed vagaries for entire years of his life. The biggest problem with it all now was that whenever he tried unravelling things he would often get lost down immense rabbit holes. He would waste entire afternoons doing little more than staring into the bobbled surface of a canvas, trying to piece his life experiences back into the order in which they had actually happened, and attempting to remember the colour of a wall, or the smell of a specific meal, or a look flicked in his direction from across a hallway. It was important for him to do that, though. It was important to iron things out, or else he would confuse the details of the time that he and Lola had shared together. And that was something he couldn't let happen: he wanted to get everything in place before he saw her again, and before those details were all taken from him for good.
Another heavy cough scragged him from the trance before he could exhaust too much time exploring the nostalgia of older nostalgia, and he resolved to leave the car. It had stopped raining and his body was in need of unravelling. Some ten hours had passed without his moving much more than an inch or so in either direction, and his bones had fused in protest. He turned the door handle but the added gravity from the Aston's pitched stance swung it open too quickly for Paul to retain control. The door yanked him clear of his seat, freeing the trapped polystyrene foot at the end of his right prosthesis with a warm pop before the steel of the outer door could screech to a rest against the tarmac. Half in and half out of the car, and with dignity now far from reach, he held the door and the frame with each hand and pulled himself backwards out of his seat, onto the sodden ground. The stick protruding from his right trouser leg, mismatched against the brogue on his left foot, served as a means to taunt him further – as a reminder him of his ungainliness. He dragged himself upright and retrieved the wooden walking stick and his suitcase from the passenger seat, deciding to leave the other shoe and its faux inhabitant lodged wherever the footwell had snagged it. He then heaved the door upwards to a close. Cool air whistled by his ears as he stood in silence, a hand on the roof of the car. He stayed like this, torpid, for a fair while. He daren't say anything out loud, but Paul was silently and solemnly thanking the Aston for its years of service – its empty, needless friendship. Then he limped away without looking back, because doing so would do him no good.
He was at the tip of North London without transport, without anywhere to sleep and without even the pencilled outline of a plan. He knew only two things, the first of which being that he would not possibly get to where he intended before dark. The second was that, given the tiniest crack of a chance to do otherwise, human beings could not be trusted to act morally. The radio had told him that all was lost, and he did not want to see which bleak avenues that realisation would coerce humanity down come nightfall. He walked south along the road until the bulk of the trees cleared away to the right, revealing yet another field of undulating green. Bulbous holes of sand and water littered the golf course, acting as the only break in an otherwise grim plane. Opposite the darkening sky the wet grass appeared almost black. Paul followed the path along the road's edge until there was a turning to mark the club's entrance. A plaque on a chest-high wall read 'The Shire of London' and was adorned with a bronze figure mid-swing. It was quickly thinning with cold, light being chased to the recesses of the sheet above him. It left Paul with little choice but to investigate.
The driveway wound to an empty car park and a modest, one-story clubhouse. Around the back, on the side that faced the course, there was a patio dining area laid in limestone panels, spreading out like gritted teeth from a pair of sliding glass doors. Paul weaved through the dining furniture with a succession of grunts and peered into the panes, but could see nothing much of anything beyond. There certainly wasn't any movement, inside or out. He rested his stick and his suitcase against the doors, steadied his foot and his prosthesis and heaved up a stainless steel patio chair, gripping it by the back. He jostled it to get the weight of the thing, inwardly appalled at how loose and cracked the skin that webbed between his nearest thumb and forefinger appeared up close. The chair's hollow legs sang as he trailed it through the air. After a couple of mock attempts he began to swing it at the door, whereupon it bounced off with a light thud, not even leaving a mark. On the second attempt, however, the chair drew an instant crack across the centre of the pane.
He swung again and the crack widened slightly. And after a quick break he whacked it again, harder and with more energy than he had managed to put to any task in recent memory. This time a network of tears splintered outwards from the first like lightning, though the door stayed intact. The pattern was a match for the crack of his car's windshield, and it caused a replay of tracksuit and pale flesh bouncing over him to rise in his mind's eye. He dropped the chair and sank to the paving, enervated. He was sure that if he kept going long enough he would eventually make it inside, but relentlessly swinging and cracking metal against glass was arduous. It rattled his core. Breaking and entering is a younger man's game, he thought, fighting to snatch a regular pattern of breathing from a sea of gasps. He considered the man he had killed, and his complete apathy to it, and his stifling weakness, and a tear emerged. It followed the track of a fold in his skin which connected his nose to his chin, then dropped to his suit jacket.
'I'm broken, El,' he thought to himself, scratching at the back of his head, though no sound escaped his mouth. 'I'm so broken without you.'
But he needed to push on. He needed to continue; there were five days until everything would end. Or four-and-a-bit now, he reasoned. Even if he could not quite grasp the full and honest nature of what that meant, and even though his brain would not currently let him try, he knew that it was still plenty of time to make it to see her, and to tell her exactly what he had realised in their time apart. Paul Everett wanted to survive long enough to die right, so he heaved himself up, lifted the chair, and continued to club it into the glass.