Last One at the Party Page 6

  I tried to eat and drink, and promptly threw everything up again.

  I grabbed a bottle of gin from the cupboard and drank straight from it.

  Then I went into the bathroom and threw that up too.

  James was everywhere. His toothbrush in the bathroom, his dirty pyjamas hanging out of the washing basket, his unwashed tea mug sitting by the sink, his smell permeated from everything he sat on, slept in, touched. I couldn’t move without seeing or smelling him.

  In the end I cleared everything that reminded me of him out of the living room – photos, his slippers, the half-read book he would now never finish – and spent the rest of the night pacing, touching my window corner of power and watching the BBC broadcast their empty news desk.

  No one came.

  As soon as I could see it was getting light outside I showered again, washed and dried my hair, got dressed, and did my make-up. I practised hiding my horror and smiling normally in the mirror.

  Why?

  I have no idea. Who did I think I was going to bump into who would worry about the state of my hair and face and whether I was panicking? The neighbours? My boss? Random people in the street? Did I really think that any other person currently still alive would run from me because my hair was wild and my face covered in a greasy sheen of fear?

  The world had moved on. I hadn’t.

  I packed a small overnight bag with all the things I would need for a weekend away and tidied the flat so that it would be clean when I got back.

  I didn’t need to do any of this. It was needless instinct and routine, but it soothed me, and by the time I left the flat I was still panicking but no longer felt like I was having a heart attack.

  I didn’t think about the significance of leaving our flat for the last time. I couldn’t cope with the finality of leaving my life and husband for ever. Instead, I allowed myself to believe that I was just visiting my parents for a couple of days and would be back soon.

  I closed the front door on my way out.

  As far as I know it has stayed closed ever since.

  I didn’t have the energy to cry again.

  December 13th 2023

  I needed a car. There was no longer any public transport, the place I had to get to was a good twenty miles away, and there was no other option of getting there.

  James and I had never owned a car and most people we knew didn’t own one either – there had never seemed much point in having one in central London. Luckily, I had learnt to drive a couple of years ago, otherwise I would have been completely buggered.

  Greg and Michael from Flat 9 owned a car. A massive Range Rover, which was a bitch to park and was forever breaking down, which was unsurprising as it should have been used for long journeys and off-roading in the country rather than a three-mile drive to Selfridges at the weekend. It was their pride and joy. It was parked outside the house. They kept the keys in a dish on their window ledge.

  As I closed their front door behind me, I glimpsed James in the bedroom, but I didn’t go back in.

  The roads were empty, which was good because I hate driving at the best of times, let alone when I am deep in panic mode and can’t remember the last time I slept. I had to employ both my corner of power and repetitive singing of ‘Merrily we roll along’ to stay focussed on getting where I was going and not just pull over and spend the rest of my life hyperventilating at the side of the road.

  I still drove very, very slowly, and the journey that James would do in forty minutes took me an hour and a half.

  I was on the outskirts of London when I saw my first pyre. I spotted the smoke from a couple of miles away. I thought maybe a building had caught fire, but even from that far away, and with the little I know about fires, I could tell that it was nothing like the blanket of smoke that comes from a raging blaze; these were lazy, thick black plumes rising sluggishly into the sky in separate towers of darkness.

  I was on an overpass above a large patch of wasteland and the smoke was coming from below. I instinctively knew what it was before I stopped to look. A voice at the back of my head repeated ‘Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. DON’T!’ as I grabbed something to cover my nose and mouth from the fumes, opened the car door and walked to the edge and looked over.

  I don’t know how many bodies there were. Some were already ash, some were blackened and twisted, and some lay on the surface, untouched by the flames and heat. The fires had been started but not maintained, so the top third of the pile (hill? mountain?) was simply decomposing bodies.

  There must have been thousands.

  The overpass was surely sixty or seventy feet high and, had I hung from it by my feet, my hands could have touched the bodies on top.

  I had stopped the car by a series of abandoned dumper trucks close to a smashed hole in the side fencing of the overpass. I now understood why the fencing was broken. When the pile got too high to add to from the ground, they must have driven the dumper trucks up here and dumped the bodies over the edge.

  I don’t think it is possible for the human brain to comprehend this level of horror. At least I know it wasn’t possible for mine to.

  I took the cloth away from my face and vomited. Then I took a deep breath in, smelt the revulsion of hundreds of burnt, decomposing bodies, and vomited again.

  I got back in the Range Rover and screamed.

  The three minutes spent on that overpass take pride of place in my nightmares to this day and, I believe, will continue to do so until the day I die.

  When I set off again, I was, once more, incredibly thankful for the empty and clear roads. I was now shaking so much the Range Rover was juddering from side to side as my hands jerked the wheel back and forth.

  Every so often there would be a crashed car nosed into a hedgerow or lamp post, but other than that there were no clear signs that the end of the world was taking place.

  I saw three other moving cars during my ninety-minute journey.

  The first passed with exaggerated slowness; a man driving with a woman and two kids in the back. The woman and kids were slouched together, but the man wasn’t sick, or at least wasn’t yet. We stared at each other as we passed. It was only as I drew level with them that I saw the woman and children were already dead.

  I drove past the next car at speed and didn’t look at the car or driver.

  The third car was weaving across the road in front of me. It came to an abrupt stop by mounting the kerb and driving into a wall. No one got out of the car and I didn’t stop to investigate.

  It was getting dark by the time I finally arrived home. Although I haven’t lived with my parents for over ten years, it is still the first place I think about whenever anyone talks about home.

  But, parked in the driveway, I suddenly didn’t want to go into the house. I couldn’t face the final horror of finding my parents dead after all the other horrific events of the past week.

  I decided to go for a walk instead.

  I walked the streets that I had previously strolled along with my parents at this time of year, admiring the Christmas lights and decorations in our neighbours’ houses. I used to love peeking through windows to get snapshots of other people’s lives – warm, cosy, filled with love and holiday cheer.

  That evening it looked almost exactly the same. Solar-powered or timed outdoor fairy lights were on, driveways were packed with cars, ‘Santa stop here’ signs were placed in gardens; but there was no warm glow through the windows or bustle of activity in the houses. I walked for over an hour, but I didn’t see movement in any of the buildings I passed.

  After a while it began to feel like a creepy village of the damned, where occupants are forced to pretend to have a jolly Christmas. There was nothing behind those lights – no joy or love or laughter. Just dead people.

  I went home.

  My parents were upstairs in their bed.

  I sat in the corner and cried.

  My parents were both teachers, the good kind of teachers, the kind that think of it as a vocation a
nd not just a job with good holidays.

  They were excellent at teaching – clever, knowledgeable, creative, exciting, strict enough to keep control but not stiflingly so, and always interesting and interested. My parents were fascinated by everything: new ideas, new ways of teaching, new places and people. They were interested in the kids that they taught; they actually wanted to know about them and how best they could teach them. They were both offered senior leadership and head teacher jobs but they never took them – it was teaching they loved, not admin. They retired at the same time from the school they had taught at for twenty years and at their leaving event nearly seven hundred ex-pupils turned up to say goodbye. They had to hold the ceremony in the playground.

  They had me very late in life (for the time) – my mum was thirty-seven when I was born. They kept her in hospital for the last month of her pregnancy even though she, and I, were perfectly healthy. She’d had six miscarriages before having me.

  My mum and dad were brilliant teachers and brilliant parents. I was an only child and always felt like I was the complete centre of their world. I was safe, happy, loved and cared for. I wanted for nothing physically or emotionally. My parents were lovely and happy people who just wanted me to be as lovely and happy as they were.

  My childhood was idyllic.

  We didn’t have much money, but Mum and Dad had time, unlimited curiosity, and endless creativity. We spent winters and wet days building dens under the dining table, rockets and spaceships out of cardboard boxes, kites out of sticks and old cloth, making wormeries or ant farms, assembling kit cars, exploring dusty old museums where security guards snoozed in corners. As soon as spring came, they would dig our leaky old tent out of the corner of the garage and, on a Friday afternoon once school had finished, they would stick a pin in the map of the UK; if it was within two hours’ drive, off we would go. Camping trips to the seaside, down along the Thames, to the Malvern Hills, to the unsung joys of Daventry and Wendover, other dull commuter towns where they always discovered something worthwhile and interesting to do.

  My memories of these times are always tinged with a rosy glow. I don’t remember the cold, dank darkness of winter days, but I do remember snow and sledging down hills on a tea tray, landing in a tumble of limbs at the bottom. I don’t remember rain leaking through the roof of the tent but I do remember the joy of sausages sizzling on the camping stove when we had successfully survived another stormy night. I don’t remember the name of the first boy who broke my heart, but I do remember how my mum held me and listened to my endless eleven-year-old diatribe about how I would never love again. I don’t remember when I crashed my bike into the car, taking out the wing mirror, but I do remember my dad telling me that as long as I was fine it didn’t matter about anything else – that was just stuff, and stuff could be fixed.

  An entire childhood of small, wonderful memories combining to form years of contented happiness.

  Growing up had been filled with joy and wonder and fun and love, I was safe and happy and cared for by people who loved me. So, is it any surprise that I expected the rest of my life to be equally easy and idyllic?

  When I finally stopped sobbing and climbed up off of the floor in my parent’s room I realised they must have both been very ill before they took their T600 because the house was a complete mess.

  The kitchen was a disaster zone of half-prepared, half-eaten rotting food, filthy dishes, and dirty surfaces. All three bathrooms had remnants of vomit and diarrhoea. There were clothes left all over the house, dirty bed sheets by the washing machine, and dust everywhere.

  My mum must have literally been at death’s door to allow things to get into this state.

  I still couldn’t face disposing of their bodies, not yet, so I did the only thing that I could think of that would make Mum happy and take my mind off the ever-growing panic inside of me.

  I cleaned.

  I scrubbed the house from top to bottom: kitchen, living room, bathrooms, bedrooms, the lot. I cleaned out cupboards and cutlery drawers, I did six loads of washing, I dusted on top of shelves and wardrobes, I changed sheets and bleached shower curtains, I even did the skirting boards. I cleaned for fourteen hours straight, stopping only for water and cups of tea.

  I couldn’t do much about my mum’s beloved garden, not because she had neglected it, but because winter had rampaged through and killed or fatally wounded most of her plants. I tried to remember the gardening lessons she had given me about the things that need to be done during winter, but my mind was blank. So, instead, I tidied things away, raked leaves, and cut off anything dead or rotting.

  I was removing Mum’s gardening gloves to put them back in the shed when I stopped suddenly. They were her favourite pair, bought for her by me a couple of years ago, covered with mud and grass stains, physical proof of the hours she spent immersed in her garden, immersed in joy. I couldn’t leave them here, to be forgotten. I put them upstairs in my overnight bag, still soaked through with mud.

  I cleaned Mum and Dad’s room last.

  They must have been bed-bound for a couple of days. The sheets were filthy.

  I carefully moved their bodies side to side, awkwardly stripped the bed, and put clean sheets on under them.

  Then I washed and cared for them with all the love that I could, all the love that they had given to me time and time again for the last thirty-six years. From the first time that they had bathed me in the washing-up bowl when I came home from hospital, to the time the previous year when I had flu and came home so that Mum could nurse me back to health. A seventy-two-year-old woman still caring for her thirty-five-year-old daughter.

  I wiped their hands and faces and brushed their hair. I dressed their pale and somehow shrunken bodies, bodies that had shielded and protected me until the day they died, now prone and vulnerable. I laid them gently back onto plumped fresh pillows.

  They were lighter than I thought they would be. As though my mum and dad were no longer really there and these bodies were just the shells they had inhabited for a short time. Still, I was careful to do no damage to them, to show them the love, respect and care in death that I should have shown them more of in life.

  Strangely I don’t remember how decayed they were or if they had started to smell yet. I think I loved them too much to care or even recognise what state they were in. They were my parents, they would always just be my parents, not corpses, not dead people.

  Before I left them for the final time I re-entwined their fingers so that they were holding hands again, just as they had been when I found them.

  I loved them very much. I hope they knew.

  As I shut the door to my parents’ bedroom I was assailed by a wave of tiredness that sank me to my knees.

  I hadn’t slept in over two days. I literally crawled across the hallway to my childhood room and dragged myself onto the single bed. The last thing I saw before falling into a deep, dark dreamless sleep was a framed photo of my parents, my best friend Xav and me that Xav had given me for my nineteenth birthday.

  We all looked stupidly happy and carefree.

  The photo beside my bed was taken on the first family holiday that Xav came on with us. We were both nineteen, had been friends for over two years, and Xav felt like one of the family.

  Before I became friends with Xav I didn’t really have many friends and definitely not a best one.

  My parents were such a joyful, interesting and comforting presence in my life I didn’t really need good friends. If I wanted to talk to anyone, I could talk to them.

  I was perfectly friendly and chatty and well-liked at school. I went to parties and got invited to hang out at the youth club. I had people that I could text, go to the cinema with or to the pub when we got older. I had plenty of people to hang out with, but good friends? Friends that you can have serious conversations with, that you can message at 10 p.m. and ask to come over, friends that actually cared if you were sad or anxious or just needed a hug? I never really had that, and never really t
hought I needed it.

  Until I met Xav.

  I was sixteen and wanted to go to a gig on the other side of London but didn’t want to go on my own so, when a girl in my year mentioned her cousin was going, sixteen-year-old, clueless me asked if I could tag along.

  I didn’t think it would be just me and him.

  I didn’t think he would view it like a date.

  I definitely didn’t think he would see this as his chance to go to a gig, get E’d up, and lose his virginity, all in one go.

  At that time I had very little experience with the opposite sex. And no experience with sex.

  I was leaning against the grubby wall of the grubby underground venue regretting my decision to schlep seventy minutes across London to see a bunch of Muse-like wannabes with the cousin of Claire Turner who, far from being the music-lover I had hoped he would be, was actually only here to try to score drugs and accidentally touch my boob at every opportunity, when some random blond bloke sidled up and stood next to me.

  ‘You realise he slipped an E in your beer?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘E. In your beer. That bloke you’re with put one in.’

  Claire Turner’s cousin was ‘having a slash’. I looked in my beer. At the bottom of the plastic glass a small white tablet was gently fizzing.

  ‘Don’t panic. I sold it to him and it’s an aspirin so it’s not going to do anything, unless you’re having a heart attack. Also, E doesn’t really melt well in beer so, even if it was real, it wouldn’t have done anything anyway, so he wasted his money on both fronts. This band is shit. Shall we go somewhere else?’

  And that is how I met Xavier Alexander William James-Stuart.

  December 21st 2023

  Five days after arriving at my parents’ I was sitting in Greg and Michael’s Range Rover outside Buckingham Palace, eating stale bread, and listening to the radio. The car had a Bluetooth sound system, but I had no idea how to work it. Every radio station was playing the same emergency broadcast, so I eventually switched it off and sat in silence.