My parents abandoned me when I was ten. Two police officers found me wandering in a country lane in the dark. My clothes were torn. I had a circular burn mark on each temple and a long deep cut in my left arm that ran from my elbow to my shoulder. They thought I had been burnt with cigarette ends and a hot poker. Attempts to trace my parents failed and, as there were no other relatives, I was put into care. The scar on my arm still had not healed even after several courses of early phase antibiotics. I hated growing up. I was bullied. I made generally shaky relationships with others I met at a youth club formed around access to a pre-fabricated concrete building with a wobbly table tennis table. I began to relate to girls; they were my salvation.
First there was Suzanne. She had a warm smile. We kissed. Her hair was pulled tightly into a French pleat. She let it down once. It was like a big soft bush. Fantastic! She did not let me feel her. I gave her up for Margaret, a Catholic. Margaret had full lips and large firm breasts that she let me feel. Only over her clothing; I never felt her nipples. It didn’t matter. It was as though all her thoughts were mine. It was glorious. She gave me up, passing the message via her mother at her front door when I called to collect her—my mind on the way there filled with the thought of her breasts, and as I left with the feeling of treachery and loss. Then there was Lesley. She let me feel her all over. She was older than me. She worked in a bank and I met her each morning as she caught her daily train. We kissed passionately in a stairwell at the end of the platform. Sexual intercourse was difficult to work out. I think we had anal sex by mistake. I said I wanted to part from her—she wanted somehow to own me. Then there was Patience. She would not let me feel her breasts because she said they were too small and she was embarrassed. She let me feel her everywhere else but our sex was always via a barrier of clothing, sometimes her pants, sometimes mine—mostly mine. We stood to it sometimes and she was amazingly passionate. We were insatiable. She seemed to be more attached to her father than she was to me. She contracted rheumatic fever and was confined to bed. I told her I thought that because of her attachment to her father our relationship had no future and she vomited all the time I was telling her. It was horrible. Then I went back to Lesley. We worked out how to have sexual intercourse but I found her too clingy. When I had sex with her best friend while we were out on a day trip organised by the youth club we had a row and parted. After that was Patricia. She was much more sexually experienced than me and we had sexual intercourse the evening of the first day we met. She was perfect. She thought about nothing else but rock and roll and sex. We did it all the time and I counted every occurrence. One day she presented me with a gift, a small parcel perfectly wrapped. It was difficult to undo. Inside was a large egg. It had been blown after piercing a hole at each end then carefully painted with strange characters in black and purple. Patricia said it would rise off the ground if you thought about it hard enough. We both tried and laughed a lot as it defied our efforts to make it respond. It was one of or happiest times together; we seemed so close. That evening I told her I could no longer continue with her. I said I found it unbearable that she had had sex with others before me. She said she loved me more than anything and always would. As I walked away with my gift, and listened to her crying, I felt as though before I had even properly started out on life it was all over.
Not long after that I found myself working as a clerk for the National Genetic Database. I enjoyed working in the A-Tower—the second biggest structure in the land. I worked on the 97th floor and had a small desk near a plastic green pot plant. Zia worked across from me as an accounting assistant. She wore glasses for close work and was always sharpening her pencil (by this time there were no pens). She had frothy blonde hair sometimes woven into plaits and her panties were often torn. I liked that—it expressed something of wantonness. We used to go into cupboards at every opportunity to have sex. It was tight in there but she still found room to bend over so that I could spank her. I used to think that other staff could here us but when I thought that I only wanted to do it more. From her I learnt that sexual intercourse was an important pact of culminating intimacy—no matter what we did we always ended with conventional sex. She died in a house fire six months after I first met her. After this I used to go into the cupboard sometimes and masturbate but it was never the same.
I had only been in the job for a year when the economic disaster struck. Brought on by the inflated price of cotton and the unrelenting greed of gambling bankers and econocrats it brought a whirlwind of turmoil and insecurity. In the wake of this initial shock came the recession, deeper and more long lasting than even the most pessimistic pundits had forecast. The newspapers were full of it and that’s all everyone in the office talked about. It was a scary time—no one knew what was going to happen next. In some countries crime went out of control. Attempts to stabilise them failed and they were cut of from the normal trade and relations with other nations. Barely had the first weak signs of recovery begun with a marginal uplift in global production drawn on by yet another surge of greed and consumption, when there was an outbreak of pandemic influenza. Millions died a miserable death—projectile vomiting and diarrhoea accompanied high fever and uncontrollable spasms of abdominal cramp. Then President Gialto was assassinated and the whole world mourned, as much out of fear for the vacuum of leadership his death created as the fear of continuing instability and risk of anarchy that such an outrage represented. A public hanging appeased some of the spreading panic but the link between the crime and the criminal was tenuous and unsatisfactory. And then there was the uprising of the religious forces; the senseless conflicts that bloomed in every country that had allowed immigrants fell victim to the smell and taste of blood. Trade barriers were added to by severe controls on individual movement.
There seemed no end to it all, indeed many thought it the beginning of the end—that Armageddon had finally come. But they were wrong. Like all catastrophes in the world’s history, things blew over. People looked afresh at satisfying their needs and began again to borrow and consume. A new immunization for every sort of influenza was discovered. Distributed solely by its discoverer and patent holder Isaac Gold who formed what quickly became the world’s richest ever conglomerate—the Gold Corporation. A new president took over from the now already historic Gialto and was immediately accepted by other world leaders, and the insurrection, so long predicted in one of the world’s most unstable countries and potential flashpoint of world conflict, evaporated in the face of forcibly imported democracy. Trade emissaries visited the pariah nations that had been isolated.
For three months around mid summer in the Northern hemisphere there was a breathing space—then Armageddon really started.
To begin with, and unbelievably, it went largely unnoticed. When someone did take an interest it was written off as a conjuring trick—an entertainment or publicity vehicle thought up by Goldmedia to keep the ailing and worried amused as they saved for their necessary repeat immunizations. No one for a moment believed that in one overwhelming calamity is was going to threaten everything that was, had been and was to come. Only when communication satellites started moving away from earth, television signals flickered and faded and mobile phones stopped working was it all taken seriously.
Goldmedia put up an announcement on their social site but only a few words of it were transmitted before their system crashed. “The scientists as Goldmedia have been monitoring a change in the earth’s…”
And so it goes.