Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

He was surprised by the way the people around him endured this wait with stolid patience, even good humour — remarkable when he considered what had happened to them, the untimely ejection from their home, the catastrophe that was overwhelming the city barely six miles away.

There were mobile phones scattered along the lines of people. He heard people trying to contact family members, offices and business contacts, trying to rearrange meetings, talk about being delayed for the next few days. People didn’t seem to be grasping what was going on. Was this what the trick cyclists called denial?

After more than an hour he reached the front of the queue.

“I’m looking for my daughter. Jane Dundas. Is she here?”

He was speaking to a dumpy woman, no older than thirty, with a WRVS armband. Women’s Royal Voluntary Service. She was sitting in what usually served as the theatre box office. She had a stack of forms, hand-drawn and evidently hastily photocopied, in front of her on a rickety foldaway desk. “I need to take your details. Is this your son?”

“No, it’s my grandson,” Ted railed, “and today’s already been a very, very bad day, and now you have already kept me and the lad waiting an hour to go through this registration bureaucracy gash. Why can’t you just help me?”

The woman looked weak, her face round and soft, and — Ted noticed — she might have been crying earlier. But now she was all cried out, and at Ted’s tirade, she just looked weary. “Right now the only way I can help you is by having you fill in this form.”

Ted leaned forward, ready to attack once more.

Jack touched his arm. The lad looked up at him, solemn, making him think again.

She’s just a volunteer. Not very smart, not very capable, out of her depth. Just trying to do the job she’s given, in impossible circumstances.

Besides, she’s right. Registering here, letting The System know where he was, was likely the only chance he would have of finding his daughter.

He felt shamed. I should be helping here. Not making more trouble.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he bent forward to fill out the form.

The woman nodded, without real reaction. It looked as if she’d had her fill of apologies, too, today.

When the form was done, the woman passed it on to a runner, a school-age girl, who took it over to a bank of pcs for entry at the back of the office. The woman started pointing out features of the theatre, like an air hostess. “You’re in the Survivor Reception Centre. On the first floor there is a Friends and Relatives Reception Centre, in the theatre bar.”

“The bar.”

“Yes. You might find your daughter there. We have a rest area for the emergency personnel, a transit area for people to be passed on to other centres… We’re very busy.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ted again. For being such an arse.

But the woman had already moved on to the next in line, a heavily overweight man with a small, unhealthy-looking dog under his arm.

Ted moved away. “That went well,” he said dismally.

Jack squeezed his hand. “You’ll get used to it, Granddad.”

“Maybe.”

“What do we do now?” Jack asked.

“We find a toilet,” said Ted firmly.

Even that wasn’t so easy. The theatre’s regular toilets were closed up — no running water, and the drains were blocked. There was a single chemical toilet in a Portaloo on the patio outside the entrance, with another immense but patient queue, which Ted joined; at the door there was a Red Cross official, a burly man.

“How about this,” Ted said wearily. “A toilet with a bouncer. Never in all my puff.”

The elderly man behind him grunted. “I hear they’ve got lads digging latrines on the beaches. Just like the bloody war.” And he stared with stolid, resigned patience at the yellow wall of the Portaloo.

When they reached the front of the queue, Ted found the toilet flushing but it smelled clogged, and the floor was slick with drying, dribbled urine. There was a small sink with a faucet that supplied a small amount of very hot, very high pressure water. He used it to get the worst of the blood and dirt off himself, and off Jack: Ted’s own blood, in fact, sprayed over the clothing of his grandson.

He felt newly shamed, that he hadn’t been able to protect the kid even from this.

On impulse he found a clean T-shirt in their single suitcase and got Jack to put it on. He stuffed his bloodied shirt in a waste disposal slot, despite a pricking of conscience. You don’t know how long these clothes will have to last.

The hell with it.

The theatre was getting steadily more crowded, with adults, kids, babies, some sullen teenagers There were just so many kids, for now sticking close to their parents, but with plenty of potential for trouble later.

All these people. And all of them would need feeding, and watering, and toilets. Young, old, thin, fat, good, evil, smart, dull. And yet it was the purpose of all human endeavour, as far as he could see, to preserve every last one of them, as if he or she was the last human on the planet.

And they would all, he supposed, want dignity.

Not only that, they had their pets with them: there were a lot of dogs, rather fewer cats, a handful of birds in cages and fish in bowls, even a few rabbits and gerbils and hamsters in cages or shoeboxes. The animals were already making a hell of a row, and much as he approved of the principle of keeping family units together — and pets were part of the family — he could see there was going to be trouble later; animals and humans, generally speaking, did not mix.

All these people. And this was just one refugee station, of perhaps dozens, hundreds being set up, as the city became a leaking balloon, spilling its people across the countryside, the authorities trying desperately to mop up that sad flow in sink holes like this, trying to get some control again.

When what they should really be doing, Ted told himself, was getting the hell out of the way.

There were volunteers from all over, the British Red Cross and the St John Ambulance Brigade and the Salvation Army and the WRVS and the RAF and the Army, even from the local Rotary Club. They were carrying blankets and sheets and camp mattresses and pillows, packets of food, plastic tubs of water, but they looked a little lost about where to put them.

The RAF types had a job-lot of storm lanterns with them, and at that Ted glanced up at the light fittings. Not a flicker; no sound from any PA. No power, then; that was going to be fun later… though he wondered how those pcs were being made to work.

Ted found the family reception point, as the woman on the desk had described it. It was crowded with lost-looking people, some of them injured. But there was no sign that this place had been set up to serve its new purpose. Not so much as a bulletin board with a box of tacks.

He found a ballpoint pen in one pocket, and he scrawled his name and Jack’s on a painted wall. Jane Dundas. We’ll find you.

An anxious-looking young woman begged the pen from him, to add her own message — Mum’s here — and then another after her.

A queue started forming.

Ted turned to Jack. “Nothing but queues,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Don’t suppose I’ll see that pen again.”

“No.”

“So what do you think, lad? This place is a mess. How do you fancy a little work?”

Jack nodded seriously. “I think they need our help.”

“That they do.”

Ted led the way downstairs again.

Back towards the entrance there was even more of a crush to register than before. The lengthening, folded-back queues looked less patient than before, and there seemed to be a large number of wounded and their families being earned straight past and into the theatre.