Europe at Midnight (17 page)

“Best you let the doc check you out,” said the first voice. “You’ve had a bit of a knock.” In the distance, I heard a strange ululating noise. It was so odd that at first I thought it was coming from inside my own head, but I heard the voice say, “Here they come, mate. Not long now. They’ll look after you.”

A few moments later, the noise arrived nearby and two people in green uniforms came to look at me. They asked me some questions I was in no state to answer, shone a light in my eyes, felt my limbs, fastened a collar around my neck, then put me on a trolley and loaded the trolley into a box-like yellow vehicle. The noise began again, and the vehicle moved off. I started to scream.

“M
ALE, APPROXIMATELY FORTY
years,” said one of the green-uniformed people as they wheeled me into yet another madhouse. “RTA. Kid on a scooter knocked him over on the Market Square. Doesn’t seem seriously hurt, didn’t lose consciousness, but he seems confused.”

A woman with a dark brown face leaned over me. She was wearing some kind of blue loose-fitting tunic and trousers. She said, “What’s your name, lovey?”

“Rupert,” I said.

“Hello, Rupert, I’m Sonia. Do you know where you are?”

I tipped my head to one side. The place was brightly lit and smelled of antiseptic. Rows of people were sitting everywhere, some of them apparently injured, all of them bored.

“Hospital,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Sonia. “You’re at the Queen’s Medical Centre. Can you remember having a little accident?”

“A kid,” I said. “A scooter. Market Square.”

Sonia beamed. “That’s right, lovey.” I wished everyone would stop calling me ‘lovey.’ “We’re just going to have a little look at you. Is there anyone we can call?”

“No,” I said.

Sonia’s smile didn’t diminish. I’d never met such a relentlessly happy person before. “Okay, not to worry. Can you tell me your address? Where you’re from?”

I shook my head.

“Not to worry,” Sonia said again. She looked at the green-uniformed people. “It’s okay, lads, we’ll take care of him.”

T
HEY WHEELED ME
into a curtained-off cubicle and made me take off my clothes and put on a flimsy cloth gown thing with confusing fastenings, then they made me lie on an uncomfortable bed and I was left alone for some time listening to the various noises of the hospital.

After a while, an exhausted-looking young woman wearing maroon clothes came to look at me. She asked me some questions, most of which I answered in the negative, and she poked and prodded me, and then she went away again.

I heard her outside talking to Sonia. “He’s not seriously hurt,” she said, “but he has borderline malnutrition. You say he has nowhere to go?” Sonia must have nodded, because I heard the woman say, “I’m a little concerned about the head injury. Can we admit him?”

Sonia said something about beds.

“Well, I’m not happy about letting him go,” said the woman’s voice. “Get him x-rayed and we’ll take it from there, okay?”

Another wait. A burly man in blue clothes came with a wheelchair and he wheeled me through the chaos of the hospital. The place seemed colossal, a maze of corridors and sick people. Everyone seemed to be talking quite quietly, but it was still impossibly noisy.

I was left for a while in a room beside a big metal and glass sculpture which clicked and hummed and moved of its own accord, then I was taken back to Sonia, who told me, “We’ve found you a bed for tonight, lovey. We just want to make sure that head injury’s not more serious than it looks.” And I was taken away again in the wheelchair, deeper and higher in the bowels of the hospital, to a ward full of patients and strange bleeping devices, and I spent my first night in Europe in the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
one of the ward nurses came to see me and asked me how I’d slept. I told her I had slept very well, although the truth was that sleep had been all but impossible. The ward was full of people who moaned and cried and called out all night, and every two hours a nurse had come to see if I was all right. I couldn’t see how anyone could sleep in that, but I had actually nodded off for an hour or so.

Another woman in maroon clothes came to see me, and she didn’t look as if she had slept any better than I had. She asked me some questions, got one of the nurses to take some blood, wrote something on a sheaf of paper fastened to a clipboard.

Not long after that, a woman came round with a trolley and I was given a cup of sweet milky tea and some small biscuits. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. I ate all the biscuits without tasting them, particularly, drank the tea in two swallows, and when the woman came back down the ward I asked her for more.

All she did was laugh. “Cheeky,” she said, and moved on without stopping.

An hour or so later, my clothes were returned to me, and I was asked to dress again. Someone came round with some forms that I had to sign, and half an hour after that, feeling stiff and bruised and hungry, I found myself standing outside the Queen’s Medical Centre.

I heard someone call my name, and when I looked round I saw Sonia hurrying up to me.

“I hoped I hadn’t missed you,” she said. “Look, if you’ve got nowhere else to go, you could try here,” she said, offering me a folded piece of notepaper. “Saint Kat’s are good. Better than most, anyway. They’ll look after you. And here.” She held out another folded piece of paper, this one brightly and intricately coloured. “Get yourself something to eat, lovey. You’re half starved.”

I looked at the two pieces of paper. “I need to go to the Trent,” I told her. “I left my canoe there.”

She nodded and patted me on the shoulder. “Of course you do, lovey. But pop into Saint Kat’s first, eh? Ask for Barry. Say I sent you; he’ll see you right. Got to go; I’m on shift. Take care.” And with that, she was gone.

And so began my second day in Europe.

5

S
T
K
ATHERINE’S
R
EFUGE
For the Homeless – St Kat’s to its habitués – was a former department store on the edge of the centre of the city, a huge building on many floors. The department store had gone bust in the early 2010s and had remained vacant for years until being bought by a charity to cater for the growing population of homeless people in the area.

This information courtesy of Murchison, a wiry little chap with a strong accent who sat down beside me during lunch on my first day and elected himself as my guide into this new world.

Murchison was Scottish, from a place which had once been part of ‘Britain’ but was now independent. ‘Britain’ had once been part of Europe, but now was not. Or maybe it was. Murchison was hazy on the details, preferring to blame his own personal woes and the woes of the country in general on something he called ‘cunting Tories.’ Murchison drank a lot. You weren’t supposed to be able to get a bed at St Kat’s if you had a drink or drug problem, but that was wildly impractical and a lot of the residents spent their days wandering around the centre of Nottingham, drinking beer from tins and keeping an eye out for the police or private security guards or anyone else who looked likely to move them on.

Murchison and St Kat’s were full of surprising information, but at the moment every piece of information was surprising. The hostel had a small library of battered reference books, largely unused because the majority of the residents were unable to read. On my first morning, after being shown around by Barry, the large, jolly man who ran the place, I sat myself down in one of the broken chairs in the library, picked up an encyclopaedia, and began to read.

Nottingham was in England, and England had once been part of the United Kingdom. Scotland and Wales had declared independence about twenty years ago, and there was a small civil war going on in the West, where a county named Cornwall was trying to do the same. England was part of an island off the northern coast of Europe. Europe was too big to try to learn about all in one go.

I was already long overdue back on the Campus. Araminta, if she had any sense at all, would have gone to ground by now. I reasoned that I could stay here a day or so, learn as much as I could, and perhaps go back with some useful perspective on what the Science Faculty were doing.

So I learned about
motor cars
and
helicopters
and
money
– Sonia had given me a £20 note when I left the hospital, and it went a surprisingly long way in one or other of the Pound Shops in town – and the
Xian Flu
and
polities
. I learned about
London
. The food at St Kat’s was some of the best I’d tasted in years, although Murchison and the others were always griping about it, and it wasn’t a bad place to stay so long as you kept an eye out for people trying to steal your belongings and didn’t get involved in one of the several fights which broke out each day.

England – Britain, Europe, the whole world – had gone through a terrible time. A series of economic collapses had come one after the other in the early years of the century, and then the flu had gone through the population like a scythe. Countries had fractured, and then fractured again. A railway line that crossed the Continent had declared itself a sovereign nation. I couldn’t begin to understand how it must have been to live through all that; until the Fall, the Campus had remained the same for centuries. I was only now starting to understand just how small and primitive my world had been, only now starting to appreciate what we must have looked like to Araminta.

There were practicalities to be addressed. Here, you needed
money
to do pretty much anything. On the Campus, our Faculties had provided everything, but here, if you wanted a meal or clothing or a bicycle, you had to buy it. You did jobs for money, but there were no jobs, hadn’t been for years. Murchison and some of the others spent days sitting on the pavement in town, looking pathetic, and sometimes passers-by gave them money, but they had to be careful because begging was one of the offences that could get you kicked out of St Kat’s, if it didn’t get you arrested first. It all seemed terribly uncertain.

Religion was also something of a shock.

I had come from a world where everyone was white, no one had to pay for anything, and there were no gods. All our books had been rewritten and edited so that we had no idea that this other world existed. We all spoke the same language. Compared to this place, my home was a pale, insipid thing, and I came to hate whoever had condemned my people to that.

“I have to go to the Trent,” I told Murchison on the morning of my third day at St Kat’s.

“The River Trent, aye?” Murchison asked.

“Yes. I left my boat there.”

“You’ve got a
boat
, have you, Rupert old son?” he said. “What is it? Speedboat? Cabin cruiser? Got yourself a dolly-bird on board, have you?” A large portion of Murchison’s day seemed to be dedicated to thinking about dolly-birds. When he wasn’t thinking about drinking.

“It’s a canoe,” I said. “A kayak.”

“Kayak?” He nodded sagely. “One of they
In-u-it
thingys, then.”

“Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t the first idea what he was talking about. “Can you tell me how to get to the Trent?”

“Ach,” he said, “I’ll go with you. I’m not doing anything important this morning.”

Together, we walked into the centre of town, and then out again, Murchison happily swigging from his breakfast tin of beer and chattering about whatever came into his mind. It was a drizzly morning. At one point, I said, “Where can I buy a gun?”

He looked at me in surprise. “A gun, is it? What kind of a gun?”

I remembered something Araminta had said. “A semiautomatic rifle,” I told him.

Give him his due, Murchison gave it serious consideration. “You could always try one of they gangs over in West Bridgford,” he said. “They’re always shooting at each other. Wouldn’t be cheap, though. If you had enough money to buy a gun, they’d be more likely to shoot you with it and take the money.”

“How much?”

He thought about it again. “Well, my mate Sam, he had a mate who got himself a pistol. Glock, nine millimetre. Cost him about thirty quid, but it was a piece of crap. Blew up when he tried to use it. Lost his hand.”

I wondered if there was anything on the Campus that someone here would pay for. We needed weapons if we were going to do anything at all about the Science Faculty, and I’d read enough now to agree with Araminta. Bolt-action rifles and revolvers just weren’t going to be enough.

We walked through the housing estate that I had first seen when I came off the river, and then across the scrubby playing fields behind it until we came to the Trent. We walked up and down for a while until I spotted the place where the bank had collapsed. I led Murchison to the place where I had hidden the canoe, but of course someone had stolen it.

B
ACK AT
S
T
Kat’s, Murchison didn’t seem too disappointed with his day. He’d had a nice walk, drunk a couple of tins of beer, and on the way back he had found not only a £10 coin but half a packet of cigarettes lying on the pavement, which in his world was roughly equivalent to discovering the treasure of an ancient Pharaoh.

I went back to the room I shared with Murchison and two other men, and I sat on my mattress and tried to think. The department store had been converted into a hostel by sub-dividing up each floor with flimsy wooden partitions. It was, Murchison told me, just one dropped cigarette end away from being an inferno. He said there had once been fire extinguishers in every room, but they had been removed when it turned out some of the residents were taking them down to a nearby shop and exchanging them for bottles of Scotch. The shopkeeper had then sold the extinguishers to local schools and restaurants for five or six times the price of the alcohol and everyone had been happy.

Could I swim back onto the Campus? The current into the Trent was strong, but I thought I could do it. Would it even work, though? Did you have to be in a boat? And how was I going to find the way back in the first place? I needed a boat just to be able to find the little river again. Could I steal a boat from somewhere? I couldn’t afford to buy one. I couldn’t even afford to buy a
Glock nine millimetre
, not even one that would blow my hand off.