Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“Seventeen. I didn’t see it until I was that old. I should have seen it right away.”

“You were only a child…”

“I should have known.”

“So what happened?”

He looked out at the view through the wall: plants in the garden dusting the tilled earth with green shoots.

“They said I could go anywhere I wanted. Shan’oui said that, it was her that made them stop the breeding programme. She was trying to protect me again.”

“So where did you choose?”

“The Arctic.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “They had a research station up there, they, they hated the cold but it never stopped them… Shan’oui must have pulled some strings to get us there. It wasn’t the place I came from, but… I don’t know. It looked kind of the same.”

“I suppose you must have missed it. The Arctic, I mean.”

“I thought I did. Then I got there. I hadn’t seen snow or ice for years. At first I just ran out like an idiot and threw snowballs at everything. But it was so cold . I’ve never felt so cold, not even when I lived there before. And I’d forgotten everything. I tried hunting seal, but I nearly killed myself trying to cut a hole in the ice. I don’t know what I would have done with one anyway…”

“How long were you there?”

“It was supposed to be two months. I asked to go home after three weeks. Then another week to arrange a flight. So about… a month. Something like that.”

“And you didn’t escape while you were there?”

“No. It was on the way back. We had to stop for fuel. The jet was sitting in the airport and they were talking about me, I heard Shan’oui on the phone to someone about the breeding programme and she was trying to get them to stop, so she wasn’t keeping an eye on me. It was cold outside. I took a parka and walked out. They didn’t stop me.”

“That’s very brave.”

“I wasn’t trying to be brave. I don’t know what I was trying to do.”

“You were trying to get away, surely?”

“I don’t know. I was more… fed up. Sick of it. I don’t know.”

“Were you scared?”

“I was, once I was in the airport. I’d never seen that many Soo all at once. I thought they were going to put me in hard labour any second.”

“It’s a good thing you had that parka.”

“I hadn’t thought about it. It was just cold. But once I was inside, I couldn’t take it off, or they’d have known I wasn’t a Soo.”

“Did you get through the airport?”

“Yes. I don’t know how. I just walked and eventually there was an escalator. I don’t know why they didn’t stop me. After a while, I was in a train station. Then I got lucky again, somebody’d got off a train with a day ticket and was asking people if they wanted it, so I took it, got on a train and went off to the city.”

“What was that like?”

“It wasn’t anything like Hub Metro. It was a mess, they didn’t have any parks and it was all roads everywhere. All the buildings were close together and there were so many Soo… children as well, crowds everywhere… I didn’t know you could even have that many people…” He trailed off, still struck by the memory. “I got lost. I was hungry. It was stupid. And then I saw the sign.”

“Like the one in Kintrex?”

“Just like the one in Kintrex. It was for a bus stop. And it had a map. The map said ‘you are here’ and showed all the routes. And I saw there was a zoo in the city. So I went there.”

“Why? Wouldn’t that be the last place you’d want to go?”

“I didn’t know what to do! I mean I was really lost by then, I wanted to go home, that’s what I thought zoos were, places where Pu lived. I thought if I could get back there, I’d find more Pu and they’d let me stay with them. It was stupid .”

“You were scared. It’s understandable.”

He sighed. “I used the ticket and got a bus, I don’t know how I made it, it was packed full of them, I just wanted to crawl out of my skin, but I got there and… I found out what zoos are really for. I couldn’t get in at first, you needed money. So I went round the side and climbed over a fence. And then I figured it out.

“It was for animals — it was full of animals. They had reptiles and tropical birds and all the big marsupials. And a polar bear as well, poor bastard. He was sitting there next to a pool and his fur had gone all beige. I didn’t get it. I thought the Pu had to be in there somewhere. I ended up at the primates — chimps and gibbons and a couple of gorillas. I was frantic, I freaked out. I took off my hood and screamed at everyone to tell me where the Pu were. And when they saw me without the hood, they saw I had hair, they saw my nose, they realised what I was. They all backed off. There was this little girl who’d been frightened by one of the gorillas and then she saw me and she was even more frightened. That’s when I knew what they really thought of us.”

“You hadn’t known before?”

“I’d never seen what it was like on the other side of the glass.”

He sighed a deep sigh and put his head in his hands. I poured him some water and offered him the cup.

“They put me in a fucking chimpanzee cage while they waited for Shan’oui to turn up. And I was happy to see her, like a fool. All the other Soo were treating me like… well, like what they thought I was. I asked her why they kept us in zoos if zoos were for animals, and she said it was for our own good. For our own good they were caging us up!

“That’s when I started hating them. It was then. When they put me in a cage and I knew it. And I figured out where I’d been all my fucking life. In a fucking cage!” There was more than anger in his voice. There was steel as well, and his hands were trembling. I made him tea, and spent the rest of the session bringing him down from the anger and back to something approaching tranquillity.

“You’ve been getting on well with Pew,” I said to Olivia as she slurped her coffee.

“He’s good in the garden. So?”

“It’s nice to see you socialising.”

“He’s a good boy. He listens. Unlike some people.”

“Hm. Well, what I wanted to do today was pick up on a discussion we had at dinner. You mentioned you’d attended a medical school. Does that mean you’re a medical doctor?”

“I never said that.”

“But you went to medical school.”

“Yeh. So?”

“I know a few people who did the same…”

“Oh, so you’ve got doctors on Hub? Big whoop-ee-do.”

“But what you said about medical students is absolutely right.”

“It’s a law of the universe. No, I’m sorry, multi-bloody-verse. All medical students are bastards.”

“They do tend to drink rather a lot…”

“That’s not all they do. Many’s the time I carried a brick in my purse when I walked out at night. Used it once, almost got sent down for that.”

“How did you become a medical student?”

“What, are you surprised?”

“Well, it does sound like your world was rather misogynistic…”

She snorted. “You don’t know the half of it. Probably looks like the dark ages to girls like you.”

“But you didn’t accept it?”

“No I bloody didn’t. They only started taking women the year before and they actually said, get this, they’d let a couple in so they could faint and show all the others a woman could never qualify. Right, I thought, I’ll show you…”

“That certainly sounds like you.”

“It wasn’t funny!” she snapped. “They wanted us to fail. They thought we’d get the vapours at the first dissection.”

“I take it you didn’t.”

“Have you ever cut open a corpse? All oozing and stinking of formaldehyde?”