Hunger isn’t only a debilitating physical thing but it also saps mental strength. I have plenty of water but what I would give for a packet of crisps or a big Mac. I am starving. Water, now I have plenty of water, too much bloody water, its been raining up here for days now and on the first day I filled up some cut in half Pepsi bottles I took up here with me. Yeah, water I have, but no food.
I always wondered what it was like up on these rooftops. I worked in the building below for years and I used to while away those minutes you always have that take a bit more to fill up than the usual minutes. You know the kind, the minutes between 3 and 4 o’clock when it seems like the clock is going backwards, or some crafty boss has put some blue tak on the minute hand to slow it down. I heard a story once that some crazy mathematician had worked out that time was moving objectively faster, it wasn’t just that holidays were so good that the days flew by, it was that time was getting faster and faster until at some point in the near future when time, and everything along with it, would implode. The guy had just recovered from a brain tumour and anyway, those maths weirdoes always tend to go mad at some point. All that messing about with the fabric of the universe always tends to fry the brain. I was proud of poking a hole in his theory. Time, I decided, was sentient and an evil little bastard and would slow down and speed up depending on just exactly how much you were enjoying yourself. You could say there was an inverse relationship between misery and how fast time passes.
I’ve been doing that more and more these days, going off on mental tangents. I don’t think it’s a good sign, neither is the chronic diarrhoea I’ve had for the past couple of days, there’s a part of the roof I don’t dare go near now when the sun comes out, not that the sun comes out much just now.
I started keeping a journal for a while, but it’s getting harder and harder to concentrate on keeping it up to date and I’m not sure if days or weeks have passed. It doesn’t really matter anymore, but maybe someone will find it one day. It’s my legacy you see. I want people to know what happened, well, how it seemed to start anyway.
I flick through the pages of the A4 sheets that will become my lasting testament to what happened down there. A shriek pierces the still afternoon air and for the thousandth time I am terrified again. I have heard them prowling about down there making the occasional noise. At least the screaming has stopped, that’s a good thing. It’s been a couple of days since I heard anyone try the roof door. That’s a good thing too. My nerves couldn’t take anymore of that, but I’m too much of a coward to throw myself off the top, it’s not high enough that I might black out on the way down, and what if when I land I am still conscious? I feel like crying, but don’t. What would be the point?
I scan through the pages reading it to myself.
This is the testament of Bill McArdle, for posterity I have decided to record the events of the last couple of months in what I call the end of times. Sorry, that’s sounds a bit pompous and honestly I don’t want to come across as pompous. I just want to tell you what happened.
It all started off quietly, is that a cliché? I worry that this will sounds like a bad horror novel. It is, but horror novels don’t happen. You don’t see someone’s head cracked open normally. I couldn’t stop looking at the brains. I couldn’t help either. Am I getting ahead of myself?
The news in the first couple of weeks was full of news of Iraq. It had fallen to civil war and was getting bad. Father’s fighting sons and all that. People here did their usual and shrugged and tutted and said how horrible. There was all the usual talk of how bad America was and didn’t they realise that they were the cause. The British Prime Minister tried to spin his way out of it, but that became harder and harder, especially when Iran sent troops into assist one side or another. I honestly don’t know which because politics and conflict never really interested me. I don’t think it ever really interests anyone if they aren’t involved; it just becomes part of the background noise that we have all become so used to. I didn’t follow the details too closely but as far as I remember Saudi joined sides with the one side in Iraq against the Iranians and the next thing we knew the Israelis started in on it as well.
The next few pages were scribbled on with lines crossed out and changes made to what was on the page.
This isn’t working, that’s what I had written on the page. I am reading this now and thinking, have I done this properly?
I’m not some political scientist. I just knew that things were going very badly wrong over there, but it wasn’t until we heard of the first few flashes that we realised some fool has managed to detonate a nuclear bomb. The Arabs blamed the Israelis and the Israelis blamed the Palestinians. All I really know is that over here it all started to go bad very quickly. Prices started to rise in the shops, fuel, already costing a fortune started to be rationed. People panicked as the shelves started to empty and fights broke out over the least thing. A tin of beans could get your arm broke if you weren’t careful. The streets were an eerie sight with no cars; no one could afford the petrol. People started walking everywhere. I was okay; I worked quite close to where I lived. The other people at work started to look watchful and worried at the slightest thing, people were being sacked by the day as the finance and HR departments realised there wasn’t enough money to keep people paid. Four people hadn’t come back to the department in the last couple of days. One of them had punched the supervisor, a thing I had been glad to see. The miserable bastard deserved it for making everyone’s life a misery for years with his nit picking, pedantry. I had been overjoyed inside and wished with a savage glee that it had been me. Once, I would have loved to have just smashed him in the mouth just once for all the years of constructive criticism he offered me, snide character assassination.
It was that time of day, time to go home. A time that I had enjoyed so much previously, but not now though. It was getting harder and harder to get home at night what with the prowling gangs of young thugs and no police to be seen. I remembered a fuel blockade from a few years previously and had wondered at the time how long it would be before things started to go wrong. Petrol is the blood that keeps this country going, but we are fat and western and spoiled and we took it for granted in much the same way we took it for granted that when we got up in the morning everything would be okay again and anything that had looked slightly iffy or bad with the world would resolve itself, because it always did. We could always go into town and buy a new DVD player with whatever technological improvement that was in vogue that week, an improvement that we could never have lived without if we didn’t get it. Events took a while to sink into people’s consciousness. Things weren’t getting better, they were getting steadily worse, but people tried not to notice. I started to get really scared when the music shops started to close. It never got so bad that we couldn’t buy a CD? Could it?
I tried to stick to the main roads and the busier parts of town on the way back to my flat. No buses passed by. The only vehicles on the road seemed to be the army, but they never stopped and usually even passed by when they saw trouble. The police and the army seemed to have other things on their mind and people started to grumble and complain louder everyday. More and more people started to gather and listen to that shouty troublemaker that everyone had ignored before. Suddenly he was making a lot of sense and that maybe we should start to mend our ways before it was too late. As far as I could see people were just trying to replace one crutch with another, no one was telling them what to do now so they had to look for someone else to do that, to tell them how to behave and where to go. I stood for a minute and listened to one of them as he shouted about the end of days and how we had all brought it on our selves. He didn’t see the half brick until it was too late and his head was split open. He slumped top the ground, his mouth a small o of surprise. I ran when everyone started to scream, ashamed at my fear of getting caught up. The police weren’t out stopping things like the used to. I ran almost all the way home. Home by this point wasn’t much like it was supposed to be. Electricity was intermittent and best and nothing keeps in a warm fridge.
I freeze on the rooftop, was that a scratching at the door over there? I’ve been very quiet, they can’t know I’m up here, please God they can’t know I’m am up here.
(If you good Steemites like it i will try and write some more of it...)