Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

My nephews tug at my hands, one on each, as if they’d propel me down to deck level: a tempted Jesus toppling off the cliff, his landing softened by attendant angels. It is a strange moment. For a second I picture myself elderly, the boys grown men, propping me up. Sentiment’s ambushed me a lot this year. I was engaged to be married once. But the wedding fell through. The girl went to be a trophy for some party bigwig I hardly know. Like most men, then, I’ll not marry now. I’ll have no kids. Past thirty now, I’m on the shelf. And while it is an ordinary thing, and no great shame, it hurts, more than I thought it would. When I was young and leant my shoulder for the first time to the civic wheel, I’d entertained no thought of children.

The mayor’s abroad among the builders now. They cheer and wheel around him as he waves. His hair is wild, a human dandelion clock, his heavy frame’s a vessel, wallowing. He smiles. He waves.

A man in whites approaches, a pint of beer – of London Pride, of course – on a silver tray. The crowd is cheering. I am cheering, and the boys. Why would we not? Politics aside, it is a splendid thing. This place. This moment. Our mayor fills his mouth with beer and wheels around – belly big, and such small feet – spraying the crowd. The anointed hop around, their dignity quite gone, ecstatic. Around me, there’s a groan of pop-idol yearning, showing me I’m not alone in wishing that the mayor had spat at me.

IT’S FOUR BY the time we’re on the road, back to Hampshire and home. The boys are of an age where they are growing curious. And something of my recent nostalgia-fuelled moodishness must have found its way out in words, because here it comes, “So have you had a girl?”

“It’s not my place. Or yours.”

“But you were going to wed.”

The truth is that, like most of us, I serve the commons better out of bed.

I’ve not been spat on, but I’ve drunk the Mayor of London’s piss a thousand times, hardly dilute, fresh from the sterile beaker: proof of the mayor’s regard for my work, and for all in Immigration.

The boys worry at the problem of my virginity as at a stubborn shoelace. Only children seem perturbed, still, by the speed of our nation’s social transformation, though there’s no great secret about it. It is an ordinary thing, to prize the common good, when food is scarce, and we must husband what we have, and guard ourselves against competitors. The scrumpy raids of the apple-thieving French. Belgian rape oil-tappers sneaking in at dusk along the Ald and the Ore in shallow craft. Predatory bloods with their fruit baskets climbing the wires and dodging the mines of the M25 London Orbital.

Kent’s the nation’s garden still, for all its bees are dead, and we defend it as best we can, with tasers and wire-and-paper drones, klaxons, and farmer’s sons gone vigilante, semi-legal, badged with the crest while warned to do no Actual Bodily Harm.

(“Here, drink the mayoral blessing! The apple harvest’s saved!” I take the piss into my mouth and spray. The young lads at their screens jump up and cheer, slap backs, come scampering over for that touch of divine wet. Only children find this strange. The rest of us, if I am typical (and why would I not be?) are more relieved, I think, rid at last of all the empty and selfish promises of our former estate.)

So then. Hands on wheel. Eye to the mirrors. Brain racing. I make my Important Reply:

“One man can seed a hundred women.” Like embarrassed grown-ups everywhere, I seek solace in the science. This’ll fox them, this’ll stop their questions. “And so, within a very little time, we are all brothers.”

“And sisters.”

“Sisters too, sometimes.” This I’ll allow. “And so, being kin, we have no need to breed stock of our own, being that our genes are shared among our brothers. We’ll look instead after our kin, feed and protect our mayor, give him our girls, receive his blessing.”

“Like the bees.”

Yes. “Like the bees we killed.”

In northern Asia, where food’s not quite so scarce, they laugh at us, I think, and how we’ve changed – great, venerated Europe! Its values adapting now to a new, less flavoursome environment. (“Come. Eat your gruel. Corn syrup’s in the jar.”) They are wrong to laugh. The irony of our estate is not lost on us. We know what we’ve become, and why. From this vantage, we can see the lives we led before for what they were: lonely, and selfish, and without respect.

Chichester’s towers blink neon pink against the dying day. It’s been a good excursion, all told, this airfield opening. Memorable, and even fun, for all the queues and waiting. It’s not every day you see your mayor.

“How come we killed the bees?”

“An accident, of course. Bill, no one meant to kill the bees.”

Bill takes it hard, this loss of natural help. It fascinates him, why the bond of millennia should have sheared. Why this interest in bees? Partly it’s because he’s being taught about them in school. Partly it’s because he has an eye for living things. Mostly, though, it’s because his dad, my brother, armed with a chicken feather dipped in pollen mix, fell out of an apple tree on our estate and broke his neck. Survived, but lives in pain. Poor Dan: the closest of my fifty kin.

“We spray for pests, and no one spray did for the bees, but combinations we could not predict or model with our science.” True. The world is rich and vast and monstrously fed back into itself. Science works well enough in a lab, but it is so small, so very vulnerable, the day you lay it open to the world.

The towns slip by. Hands on the wheel. An eye to the mirrors. Waterlooville. Havant. Home. Dad’s wives at the farmhouse windows wave, and Dad himself comes to the door. Retired now, the farm all passed to Dan. But Dad is still our centre and our figurehead.

I ask after my brother.

Dad smiles his sorry little smile, “It’s been good for him, I think, today. The rest. Reading in the sun.”

“I’m glad.”

The old man leans and spits a benediction on my forehead. “And you?”

IN AN EMPTY cinema, seats lower themselves in readiness for their customers. An orchestra sits, frozen, the musicians as poised as shop dummies, freighted with uncanny intent.

Two needles approach each other. Light sparks and blooms between their points, filling the screen.

A cameraman lies across a railway track, filming the approach of a locomotive. The man rolls out the way of the train at the last second but one foot still lies across the rail. Carriages whizz and rock and intersect at all angles: violent, slicing motions fill the screen.

A young woman starts out of nightmare, slides from her bed and begins to dress.

I paused the video (this was years ago, and we were deep in the toil of our country’s many changes) and I went into the hall to answer the phone. My brother, Dan (all hale and hearty back then, with no taste for apples and no anxiety about bees), had picked up an earlier train; he was already at Portsmouth Harbour station.

“I’ll be twenty minutes,” I said.

Back in those days, Portsmouth Harbour station was all wood and glass and dilapidated almost beyond saving. “Like something out of Brief Encounter ,” Dan joked, hugging me.

1945. Trevor Howard holds Celia Johnson by the waist, says goodbye to her on just such a platform as this.

We watched many old films back then, and for the obvious reason. Old appetites being slow to die, Dan and I craved them for their women. Their vulnerable eyes, and well-turned calves and all the tragedy in their pretty words. A new breed of state censor, grown up to this new, virtually womanless world, and aggressive in its defence, was robbing us of female imagery wherever it could. But even the BBFC would not touch David Lean.