The Fall of Man

Part II chapter 9

Chapter 9

The following day, Noah is sat at the workstation in his small room, with his back to the big window. Gwen’s red hair and easy smile, the soft roll of her neck line and her sweet smell hang about him in an intoxicating fug. He rolls his pointer over the familiar icons and clicks. Trawling through news archives, images and film to supplement their conversation the previous night, he pieces together a patchwork account of the years during which he slept.

Gwen’s crystal clear account of the day the List was announced still rings in his ears. She was six. Outside, it was the kind of dark, cold evening that followed a crisp winter day. Inside, Gwen sat sandwiched between her mother and father’s still bodies. She had recalled how her small family huddled close around the television that night, as if it were a roaring fire.

The List was broadcast on BBC television and radio with all the bluster of the National Lottery or Eurovision song contest. Like the relentless credits to a cinematic epic, place name after place name scrolled up the screen. There had seemed to be no order or structure to the announcements. In the course of just a few moments, the List definitively pronounced the fate of the nation. It was decided; included were those areas deemed self-sufficient enough to survive the present crisis, and those excluded were doomed to disappear.

There was never any doubt that Cardiff would be listed; it was a capital city of half a million inhabitants. Still, the hushed room breathed a collective sigh of relief when the letters rolled on-screen, alongside an image of the iconic Millenium Stadium.

A month or so later, the remodelling programme was already well underway. Flyers pushed in fistfuls through letterboxes up and down the street blew in eddies around the wheels of rusting car shells like discarded confetti. Gwen ran and rolled with the other children in the drifts; balled wads of paper hurled through the air smacked impotently against curtained living room windows. In the midst of these flurries of activity, adults walked up and down the streets - ghosts with blank faces.

A vast swathe of land was to be cleared around every town and city to be saved. In its place, a wall would be built, to draw a line between inside and outside; a clear delineation of the infected areas of suburban growth whose rot was too far gone; the extents of the human disease which must be allowed to wither and fall off. In Cardiff, the Hausian line was a vast circle of some seven miles diameter. It followed the path of the A48, a primary distributor road, in the main – and cut unflinchingly through the streets, schools and shops that lay in its path.

Gwen’s family lived many miles outside the line of the proposed Wall, in a small Valleys conurbation – originally no more than a village - that had been all but consumed by the relentless expansion of the city limits. The original high street still stood, but only as a ragged string of charity shops, bookies and bars. The community walking the paper-laden streets were an unhealthy mixture of old, infirm and unemployed... ashen-faced locals staring blankly from pub windows... bundled in layer after layer of tattered clothing, knuckles clenched around the handles of rickety tartan shopping carts... stumbling numbly from one bargain shopfront to the next. Gwen’s unsettling recollections of the death throws of a community inspired visions of an undead nation in mourning – neither rising nor sinking, not knowing what salvation it was that they waited for.

The modest terraced Victorian house of Gwen’s childhood had provided the extended Davies family with a home for almost a hundred years. She could still remember how the elegant sash windows of the living room cast dappled light from the tree-lined street outside, and made shimmering patterns on their flock wallpaper. The generous kitchen was lined from floor to ceiling with a plethora of pine-fronted cabinets that hid everything from sight that a girl could possibly want. It opened up onto a dining room that smelt of the garden beyond. Now, the rooms had become dark and filled with wood-smoke; the tall windows were sheathed in plywood and packed with cheap insulation. Broken packing crates and chopped lumber were stacked high in the hallway. Many of Gwen’s memories were of time spent tending to the long, organised garden with her father; the small patch of land and some of the surrounding area now provided most of the food on their dining table each night.