Under The Lovely Weather

Helen had been high in a hot air balloon when the Just Bomb had
tumbled to its earthly tomb. There came no 'Boom!' It was one of those
new ones. She hadn't watched the box or received the dailies for the
time afterward, so she'd seen none of the diagrams, had no idea what
kind, how it worked, just that it was called a Just Bomb (that was the
term used when they first began raining.) Just bombs weren't just 'OK';
they were good! They were God's bombs. They were holy firepower.

When Helen, or Dr. Craggs, as it said on her office door, descended
from on high she found she was the only person around for miles. She
traipsed back home in awe of the blossoming silence - there was no one
there along the way, and there was no one there when she arrived,
though the roads were sown with broken vehicles. She wandered damn near
blindly to the bus stop, and waited, but no bus presented itself, so
she went to the train station and waited for a train, but no train
presented itself. No one to drive the buses, and no one to drive the
trains, so she walked all the way, in pumps, to her office, where she
let herself in and turned on the lights. It was Sunday. She hated
tights. She sat down behind her desk and smoothed her patchwork skirt
over her freckled thighs.

That all seemed like the dawn of time now. Before that Just Bomb came
tumbling there were only dinosaurs, and Adam, and Eve, and a faint
haze, a strip of swimming heat across the horizon, in which there were
picnics and pancakes, wine with Mary, idiot boys and long nights with
long curly-haired lovers. Ancient history, ancient history, archaeology
to think of it. Hack and brush at the dry earth with her mind like a
dented spade to uncover these precious things.

There were boxes and boxes full of sandwiches downstairs, all now out
of date, and a coffee machine that spat weak tea, and water still ran
from the taps in the ladies', and the crappers still flushed, and the
sockets still served up good, jazzy electricity, and all the machines
still hummed dour notes when she turned them on and shut the hell up
when she turned them off.

The photocopier next door merrily gave birth to pictures the colour and
texture of the sky, whatever you put in it. Same as in ancient times.
Now then?there was that?terrible obsession people had with photocopying
their rear ends. Why it hadn't been til very recently that Dr. Craggs
had given into the temptation, and only then because there was no one
around anymore except her and an empty can of Heinz spaghetti in
sizzlin' sauce.

"Are you laughing at me, Flamin' Jim Morrison?" she asked the
can.

Flamin' Jim Morrison, reeling at her broad Yorkshire chimes, made no
direct reply, but Dr. Craggs thought she heard muffled laughter.

"Oh! You're so mean!"

Flamin' Jim Morrison made to apologise, but was cut off before he
could utter the first word.

"I'm bored! I've got to do something or I'll go mad!"

Dr. Craggs imposed a critical eye upon the blotchsome offspring of the
photocopier, immediately tore it into strips, pressed them into balls
in her fist and threw the balls at the waste paper basket, who hungrily
gaped.

"My bottom does not look like that!"

The waste paper basket didn't want to know. It went on gaping. Flamin'
Jim Morrison thoughtfully held his tongue.

"It doesn't! Does it?"

She awaited concurrence, then proclaimed:
"Well, I'm not going to show it to you. You'll have to take my word
for it."

She deemed the matter closed, but couldn't help but detect the can's
air of utter dejection. Much as she wished to be firm, there was
nothing to do but relent. Dr. Craggs knelt before the table on which
the can perched, crossed her hands in her lap, and considered the
bristle sting of the carpet.

"I'm sorry, Flamin' Jim Morrison. Please don't hate me. I try my best
to take care of you, you know I do. But you won't eat, and you won't go
outside and you never tell me what's wrong. What do I do with
you?"

She looked up, forlorn and imploring, and saw, staring back at her,
the Heinz guarantee.

"If you are not delighted with this product?"

She interrupted the can.

"Of course I'm delighted with you, Flamin' Jim Morrison. You're
lovely! I love you! I miss you all the time when I'm gone! Why do you
always ask me this, when you know the answer?"

For it was indeed an exchange the two of them held numerous times in
the week. The can was an insecure companion at the best of times,
always fearing another might take his place. Had quite a temper too,
when he felt jilted. Once, Dr. Craggs had exchanged a supposedly
innocent greeting with a bothersome lightbulb, who seemed to be
complaining about his state of mind. She screwed him back in, and he
ceased complaining. Flamin' Jim Morrison must've heard from the coffee
machine, for when Dr. Craggs reached out to pick him up and take him to
the window, he bit down hard on her fingertip.

"Ouch!" she yelped, in both physical and emotional pain, then went to
wash the cut under the cold tap in the ladies'. She cried into her
palms that evening, and asked over and over to be forgiven. The drop of
blood ran from the can's razor rim to the bottom of its heart, and
dried there. Flamin' Jim Morrison's steely resolve melted, and without
a whisper he determined to forgive his one true friend.

She'd no idea how she'd done it, but Dr. Craggs nursed the transistor
radio back to full health the morning after she'd photocopied her
backside. It cleared its throat, then croaked out BBC Radio 4. They
were interviewing a scientist who was concerned with the threat of
global warming, and principally how it would affect the capital. Within
a decade or so, he sagely asserted, most of London would be under
water.

"Oh God, Flamin' Jim Morrison, they're always saying this - but no one
ever does anything about it! What's the point?"

The can felt unqualified to answer such a vague question.

"You know what? When that North Sea is up to their ankles, there'll
still be so-called experts telling us it's a hoax. Others will be
calculating the extent of the damage, and everyone'll be asking each
other, 'Have you heard??' No one'll move, will they?

"Then when it's up to their knees, all the celebrities will fret that
'the end is nigh!' Newspapers will say there's a conspiracy of
cover-ups and the Prime Minister will tell us that the matter is 'being
looked into.'"

Dr. Craggs laughed merrily at the idea.

"Then! When it's up to their waists, DJ's will be joking about the
Queen calling the plumber, the Daily Mail will launch a campaign to
revive the British spirit, and the tourist industry will suffer. When
it's up to their necks, all the Londoners will be asking why no one
warned them, Parliament will pass some law to deter the rising water
level, and the BBC will show a documentary. And then, Flamin' Jim
Morrison, when everyone in London is drowned, they'll be saying on the
news that the world will never be the same again, and everyone else
will have something to talk about for the next two months."

She put the radio to sleep. The sun outside looked like a dab of white
paint on a sky of pulped newspapers.

Dr. Craggs' filing cabinet had more than a good mouthful of her
patients' details, arranged alphabetically, in the form of her many
pages of rewritten, handwritten notes. It was from these that she
extracted the necessary reams of information needed to go on the
company's computer database, so that it could be sent to the various
watchdogs, researchers and dating agencies who invested in her salary.
She didn't use the database when her patients visited though,
preferring her original, handwritten notes. Filed alongside them were
all the cards and letters she had received from those patients over the
years, (since it was company policy not to overlook such vital
evidence,) and it was these that she now set out to retrieve, and set
up atop her desk.

"To my favourite psychiatrist," read one, "If it weren't for you, I'd
have murdered my wife in her bed long ago. Cheers!"

"Helen," another greeted her. "Just seeing you is all the psychiatry I
need."

"Honey," advised a third, "if I were you, I'd set up your own
practice. First they'd ridicule you, then they'd laugh at you, then
they'd fight you, then you'd win. Don't let them keep you down."

"Dr. Craggs," lamented a fourth. "I've just won a free hot air balloon
ride from a tombola at my daughter's school f?te. As I recall, during
one of our sessions you expressed a wish to go where the air is clean?
It's the least I can do."

The letters and cards became a paper fort around Flamin' Jim Morrison,
who considered a reverent silence to be the most appropriate response
to his friend's eccentric endeavours. Dr. Craggs read each several
times through before standing them up beside their brothers and
sisters, and only stopped when her vision became too misty to tell the
d's from c-l's. Outside, the wind was dumb and could not be felt.

She was afraid of going outside. Out there lay more human blackness,
waiting to dive into her lungs and choke her. She hadn't been home
since the day the Just Bomb tumbled. But that evening, she gently woke
the radio up to listen again to its incessant babbling. There was some
music, and then more news. Someone somewhere was thinking of
repopulating the city. They would make the best of a terrible tragedy.
The BBC were out on the street, asking people what they thought of the
idea.

"Iss very sensible," said one South Londoner, "but oo'd want ta live
in a dead city?"

Dr. Craggs felt shame nuzzle at her. She knew some people who'd want
to live in the dead city, of course, and she'd all but forgotten about
them. She hopped around wildly in search of her coat, then remembered
she hadn't brought it to the office. She'd have to walk home in the
cold early evening air with her arms uncovered.

"I'll be back soon, Flamin' Jim Morrison - I promise! Don't do
anything dangerous, you hear? I'd never forgive myself. Goodbye,
darling, back soon! Take care!"

She blew him a kiss, and the can watched her leave with a heavy heart.
His parting words were too jagged, and locked inside.

Dr. Craggs fled the office, scrambled down the stairs and raced across
the lonely streets, ran til her legs gave way, stumbled and throbbed
the rest of the way home. The eyes of the streetlamps blinked and gazed
at her from their metal stalks, and the city shivered as she slammed
her front door in its empty face. She stood still, caught her breath,
coughed, revived the landing light, then ran to her bedroom, fell to
the floor beside her bedside cupboard. Hastily opening it, she pulled
from its gut every one of her photo albums, wrenched their out their
contents. Photos of herself and Mary, arms round each other, of Vicky
rolling out her pierced tongue, of Shrove Tuesday and Christmas, of
rows upon rows of teeth curtained by rose lips, of a long forgotten
civilisation flooded by the booming silence.

She gathered them up in her bare arms and went out into the street,
where she tossed them into the air, one by one, so that they swayed and
waltzed on the hushed up wind, and she cried, "Everyone, look! Look at
the lovely sky!"

The sky remained as stony as the children of the photocopier.