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  Kristin

  Michael Ashley Torrington

  Kristin

  Copyright ⓒ Michael Ashley Torrington

  The right of Michael Ashley Torrington to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted in

  accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Conditions of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For Joe

  Prologue

  The Earth shook as if hammered by a colossal fist and the burning mushroom cloud expanded and soared upwards for thousands of feet into the black sky, illuminating everything for miles around.

  He threw himself down and curled into a ball in a futile attempt to shield himself from the wave of searing, radio-active heat. But then he realized he had little to fear from the detonation. He extended an arm and found the cataclysm was very small, and he extinguished it with his thumb and forefinger, like pinching out a candle flame at night.

  He awoke with a violent jerk. There were screams from outside. A discordant wailing.

  Stumbling to the window he leaned on the damp sill and spread the slats of the blind, peering out onto the dark streets below. Lights were being switched on — first one, then another. A door opened. A figure ran off into the night. There were more harrowing screams. A beacon pulsed rhythmically, like a lighthouse, from somewhere in the heart of the city.

  Sick welled in Thom Sharman’s gullet. He sank to the floor, the drone of the four minute warning resounding in his ears, closed his eyes tight and waited for the imminent, thunderous impact, for the end of life.

  But four minutes passed ... five ... six ... the end didn’t come. He picked up the remote, jabbed it. The television sprang to life, lighting up the room, and an urgent voice boomed out, ‘ ... are in error, I repeat ... ’

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘ ... The current warnings in London and Birmingham are erroneous ... there is no cause for alarm ... ’

  He shook with laughter.

  ‘ ... Please listen for further announcements ... ’

  The presenter repeated the message again ... and again ... and again.

  He stared blankly for a few moments then lunged for a book and launched it at the plasma screen, shattering the fragile glass membrane into a thousand pieces.

  The ear-splitting din outside stopped.

  Dragging himself up he returned to the window, slid it wide open and screamed until his throat was raw. The biting cold froze him to the bone but he revelled in the glorious night air, drinking its purity. Then he fell to the floor amidst the fragmented glass and grabbed the whisky bottle from the table.

  One

  A bitterly cold wind howled around his front porch and Thom left its haven with reluctance, a heavy frost that had accumulated overnight cracking under the weight of his feet. As the first snowflakes of the winter settled on the shoulders of his thick coat he took the usual network of Greenwich’s back streets leading to the River Thames. The cold sliced right through him. But it wasn’t just the weather that stripped him bare. The world around him felt immutably altered.

  By the time he reached the river the light flakes of snow had transformed into a blizzard. Thom grimaced, yanked up his collar and leaned into the freezing onslaught, heading towards the rotunda, the entrance to the foot tunnel beneath the Thames. He stepped into the cavernous Edwardian elevator with a handful of numbed fellow commuters, forcing a place on the polished bench. The lift operator waited for a moment and pressed the button to close the doors.

  Through the sparse forest of marching legs and swinging cases he glimpsed a figure huddled against the cold, white-tiled, tunnel wall. Somebody dropped some change into the paper coffee cup at the girl’s feet and she tried to acknowledge the donation. She wore only a T-shirt, denim jacket, jeans and sandals, from which her bare toes protruded, curled against the sub-zero temperature.

  Thom had always been indifferent towards the plight of London’s itinerant population. They were dropouts. Wasters. Giving them money only made things worse, drew more of their kind onto the city’s streets. He wouldn’t give her anything, not even a sympathetic glance. He’d do nothing to encourage her.

  But as he passed the girl he made the error of looking down and her eyes, overwhelming black hemispheres devoid of white, met his. He recoiled, stumbled and walked on quickly. Why did she have to make eye contact? Damn her! Now he was involved, responsible for the useless bitch’s welfare, guilty if he didn’t return. Cursing, he rummaged in his trouser pocket and backtracked.

  His shadow stirred her from her stupor. She lifted her head and shivered, her pitch eyes staring unblinkingly as they tried to focus on the opposite wall. She accepted his offering in silence. He nodded and headed towards the north exit.

  The next morning, Wednesday morning, was even colder and the easterly wind cut through the tightly woven fabric of his winter coat with ease. He hadn’t followed his usual routine that morning, hadn’t caught the news update on television, hadn’t showered or eaten. All that mattered to him was returning to the tunnel, finding the girl again. It had been the coldest night he could remember and he’d slept fitfully, her beautiful, but destitute image slipping in and out of his mind. Where did she go when darkness fell? She couldn’t stay in the tunnel, the guards always cleared out any stragglers and locked the gates. How had she made it through that night?

  Thom wondered if it was possible for somebody to lose weight in twenty-four hours? She appeared emaciated. Her skimpy clothing was encrusted with dried vomit and the bags under her eyes made her look like she hadn’t slept in a week.

  She stared at him, and then her head dropped back to its original position against her knees and she began to rock back and forth like a child.

  ‘...You don’t remember me?’ he asked.

  She looked up again. ‘Yes, I re-member, you were here a few days ago.’

  ‘I was here yesterday.’

  ‘Yester-day. One day is the same as the next down here.’ She let her head fall back against the tiles with a crack.

  He tried to place her accent — Russian? There was a middle-aged man from Volgograd at work who sounded similar ... no, her vowels didn’t sound the same. Romanian? Czech? ‘You must be cold?’ he asked.

  ‘Cold … yes.’

  He found a five pound note and pressed it into her palm. ‘Spend it on something sensible — a hot drink, some food?’

  ‘A hot drink. Some food. Yes.’ The plume of her breath obscured her face.

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘A name. Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘ ... Kristin.’

  ‘I’m Thom,’ he smiled, infatuated, and left her.

  Two

  Thomas Sharman bought and sold stocks and shares for a living, amidst the noise and bustle of scores of others who did the same thing. It called for absolute concentration. An error on his part could end up costing his employers hundreds of thousands of pounds and he could not concentrate. All he could think about was Kristin, of her absence from the Greenwich Foot Tunnel for the last two days.

  By late afternoon obsession had consumed him. He left the trading floor in mid-transaction and walked from the gleaming steel and glass building without his coat.

  The underpass was deserted, but alive with a wholly unnatural force beyond his comprehension. He walked to its midway point, where it dipped to its lowest level and from where neither end was visib
le, then paused and continued, ascending the incline towards the south exit. Her dark, hunched form was still missing from the colourless hue of the tunnel ahead. A wave of unbearable sorrow overcame him and he fell against the icy wall. Then, when his grief had subsided he returned home, fell into the sofa and drank the whisky bottle dry.

  Soon he was in the same place, sitting on a hill overlooking a city. The bomb detonated in the air to the east. Now he could identify the metropolis: It was London.

  Confident of his powers he reached out to stifle the explosion as he’d done before but retracted his burned fingers quickly. He watched, aghast, as the nuclear flower spread with ferocious power and speed, engulfing and incinerating all in its path: the Square Mile, the West End. The great parks were instantly carbonized. The bridges: Tower, London, Southwark, exploded and the river combusted, dividing the north of the capital from the south with a wall of flames that licked hundreds of feet into a crimson sky. A woman with eyes of frozen onyx sprawled upon the grass. His mother appeared, holding out her arms in desperation, but he couldn’t reach her and he screamed as the burning shock wave hit her, tearing the clothes and the flesh from her before atomizing her bones.

  Then it was time for him to die. But as he slipped into the finality of death a voice called out to him, begged him to stay and he listened, he returned.

  Thom checked his watch — nine in the morning. He’d been lying there for over sixteen hours. He rolled off the sofa, grabbed a coat and left.

  When the elevator doors opened the black silhouette signifying her return jolted him, and his eyes watered.

  She was asleep beneath a filthy grey blanket, balled-up carrier bags stuffed beneath her head. Her black locks lay in lifeless, matted clumps and she smelled of urine. She flinched as he pulled back the covering, exposing her pallid face to the harsh, fluorescent light.

  ‘ ... Thom,’ she moaned through purple lips, propping her herself against the wall.

  ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘I am … sick,’she groaned, spitting pure black phlegm onto the ground.

  ‘ ... Did you get yourself something to eat?’

  She stared at him, vacuously.

  ‘ ... With the money I gave you.’

  ‘Some body stole the money. Whilst I slept. I sleep a lot down here, not much else to do.’

  ‘When did you last eat ?’

  ‘I can not say. Days. I am used to it. But I found some thing that looked ed-ible, on the ground.’

  He held out a hand and pulled her up, supporting her until they reached the elevator, and took her to Carlo’s, a small bistro near the pier. Inside, he handed her a red holdall, ‘Clothes,’ he explained.

  ‘Clothes.’

  ‘They were Shannon’s.’

  ‘Shannons.’

  A friend ... girl friend ... old girl friend. They’ve been in the wardrobe for months. Probably not the right size. She was a six, you look more like a four, and I’m not sure about the pumps but at least they’ll be warmer than yours.’

  She snatched the bag ungratefuly and began to remove her reeking attire.

  ‘ ... No ... in there, change in there,’ he pointed. ‘Stuff your gear in the bag and I’ll put it in the wash.’

  ‘Burn them. They dis-gust me,’ she spat.

  Thom sat and waited, looked around the café. He’d frequented the place for years but couldn’t remember the atmosphere so muted, so sombre. An old woman sat near the door, sobbing, whilst the three other patrons listened as the tinny radio on a shelf behind the counter blared the latest news.

  There was no doubt in his mind that the seeds of the situation had been sown twenty years earlier with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Weaponry that should have been located and decommissioned — short and long-range ballistic missiles, centrifuges, and indeterminate quantities of enriched uranium had been recklessly auctioned to the highest bidders. Scientists had even been included in the price of the sale to ensure everything went smoothly for the customers.

  Inevitably, the weaponry had ended up with rogue states, dictatorships and international terrorists — people who had an axe to grind with the nations of the Western World and in whose hands it could least be trusted, including a group of Islamic fundamentalists holed up in Afghanistan — psychopathic zealots responsible for a spate of worldwide bombing that had claimed over a thousand lives.

  Kristin looked very different when she reappeared. She’d washed her hair, and the clothes — stonewashed jeans, black roll-top jumper and cream-coloured, fur-trimmed suede coat were only just too big for her. The shoes seemed to fit her exactly.

  She went straight to the glass-fronted food cabinet, surveyed its contents and looked at him in confusion. ‘What food should I eat?’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he shrugged, joining her.

  There is so much. I do not know what should be eaten and what should not be eaten.’

  ‘The chicken is ... ’

  ‘Chick-en.’

  She’d used no intonation and had broken another common word, apparently unfamiliar to her, in two.

  ‘Is the chick-en ... hot?’ she asked, posing her first question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will it harm her ... me ... create more sick-ness?’

  ‘ ... No ... you’re just hungry.’ He looked at her with curiosity and made the decision for her. ‘Carlo, chicken with tagliatelle twice ... and two coffees — OK for you?’

  ‘Coff-ees ... yes.’

  Carlo didn’t even acknowledge him. Everything had changed.

  Thom put Kristin in her mid-twenties. She was of average height and waif-like physique — almost certainly exacerbated by her impoverished lifestyle. Her hair, long and straight, was as close to black as possible and her skin, despite the ravages of her day to day existence was white, flawless. Her facial features were highbred, classical, perfect enough to have been sculpted from the finest alabaster. But her eyes were extraordinary — mesmerizing, infinite spheres of sparkling black. They were unique, beautiful. Penetrating, chilling. She was a beguiling woman. And he had become beguiled, for the first time in his life.

  He watched her eat. Perhaps it was simply hunger, but she didn’t seem to chew what she’d forked, clumsily into her mouth, and she choked repeatedly. Her reaction to each mouthful swung between ecstasy and revulsion, as if each represented an entirely novel experience.

  She sipped the coffee once then opened her gullet and poured the whole contents of the cup down, gargling the hot liquid as it scalded the soft tissue of her throat before spitting it out across the table ‘Pain!’ she rasped, slamming the cup down, cracking it.

  He stared at her in astonishment; was it possible she’d never had a hot drink before?

  ‘ ... I missed you ... during the week,’ he said.

  ‘I was there, same place. Never changes.’

  ‘But I passed right through, couldn’t see you.’

  His persistence irritated her.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, I’m curious? Where are you from, how did you end up sleeping rough?’

  ‘Not much to know. I was born, some-where. In the Czech Re-public ... do you have a cigar-ette, Thom?’

  ‘Sure.’ Czech, he was right! He removed the cellophane from a new pack of Dunhills.

  She put the cigarette between her chapped lips and he lit it with an enamelled gold lighter he’d received as a gift. She inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out through her nostrils and gagged. ‘ ... Fuck! Dizzy and sick and burned!’

  ‘Been a while?’ he asked, as she held her head. But, clearly, she had never smoked before.

  ‘I came here ... eight months ago ... ’ she coughed,‘With a … friend. We lost contact and I could find no work. I … begged … at Baker Street underground, then I moved to Moorgate, and then some body told me about Greenwich. There are not as many people here but they seem more ... generous.’

  ‘Can’t you get any help?’

  ‘Help, who would help me?’ she frowned, dr
awing on the cigarette and blowing the smoke into his face.

  ‘ I mean, benefit … ?’

  ‘What is that?’ she snapped.

  ‘Money, from the state?’

  ‘Money? No.’

  ‘Feeling any better?’

  ‘Yes … feeling better.’

  Thom was staggered by the lack of worldliness of the young woman facing him across the small, scruffy table. He’d never encountered such naivety in somebody of her age, had expected her to be more wily, streetwise. Instead, she displayed the behavioural traits of a girl of thirteen and was very highly strung. But her command of the language, although clipped, staccato, was undeniable and her fluency improved with every sentence she formed, as though she were a novice learning at an inconceivably fast speed.

  He looked outside — it had grown dark. He checked his watch, ‘I’m sorry, I need to go.’

  ‘You must leave?’

  I promised my mother I’d call by.’

  ‘Mother? I do not remember a mother. But my father was very bad.’

  He looked at her inquisitively as they walked.

  ‘There were two of us. I mean, I had a brother, but my father hated me and sent me from his house forever, whilst my brother was allowed to stay.’

  ‘You don’t see them?’

  ‘Only when I dream. I despise them both and when I see my brother again I will kill him.’ She moaned and brought a hand to her temple. ‘Pain!’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I get pain, in my head, when I feel anger.’

  ‘You should see a doctor.’

  ‘Doc-tor? Yes.’

  They reached the rotunda and stood in silence.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ he asked, eventually.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘All right, will you be ... ?’

  ‘Yes. I will be ... all right.’

  ‘Good luck anyway, maybe we’ll meet again?’