Prologue

Prologue: A dish best served cold.

My imagination plagues me with images of her naked on an anonymous bed with an anonymous body poised above her. She smiles like I've seen her do so many times, but this smile is subtly different. It's coy, wicked, and surreptitious, as if she's Casting and knows I'm watching. The corner of her mouth curls in a way I've never seen before, and I like it. I find myself aroused and simultaneously crushed.

This is not a Cast, I'm sure. This is my imagination. Yet I sit locked by indecision as the image in my head shifts from the vaguely mocking smile past her chin and neck, to her chest and breasts. It lingers there, and her nipples crinkle and harden in response. The smile purses into a silent plea and she closes her eyes, daring me. She lifts her arms above her head, catching and holding her hair back at the same time. Her chest rises further and her shoulders fold down and I know without looking that she has pushed her hips upwards.

For nearly an hour I had hidden in a toilet cubicle, perched on the edge of the cold porcelain seat. Now, just before the scheduled Interval, I allowed myself to finger the catgut threaded from one arm of my suit-liner to the other sleeve. Releasing the thin cable with a tug, I coiled it unobtrusively in one hand, and prepared myself to return upstairs to the main theatre of the Opera Palace.

The Universal Opera Palace was built on the DBS, or Dirty Bomb Site, previously the London Olympic Stadium, in Stratford.The bomb had levelled the grandstands, and variously shredded or vaporised more than sixteen thousand competitors and fans during the 2012 Games. Rumour had it that the explosion propelled an airborne javelin into Stratford International Station, impaling a minor member of the Royal Family. Sixteen thousand and one.

Contemporary news film, recorded shortly after the first clean-up team arrived on-site a week after the explosion, shows the running track intact, with a neat epicentre of crater rim and rayed ejecta across the javelin field. Although the detonation was fuelled by conventional high explosive hidden in the Chinese team's over-sized electric drinks cart, the makeshift weapon had also been salted with cobalt isotopes. As a consequence, the entire site was summarily buried under millions of tonnes of sand and the coffin sealed with a concrete cap ten metres thick.

Ten years later, northeast London was declared ‘safe’, and the site, (especially since concrete building footings were already provided), was swiftly identified as a perfect area for residential regeneration. However, and to my mind not entirely surprisingly, there equally rapidly emerged a fear amongst the development’s protagonists that a presumption by the general populace of developing more than housing (say a third eye), would devalue the proposed properties.

Subsequently, in a wonderful piece of nepotistic legislation, the new government (dominated by the Scottish National Party), ordained the creation of the Inner London Opera Park. Facilities included a sports stadium (allegedly no irony intended), a Maglev transport system connecting Stratford to London proper and Europe beyond (again, the planners rigorously denied any sense of irony), an opera house, and three and four bedroom detached executive residences.

The adverts at the time claimed ‘Stratford; We’re Back’, which immediately leant the entire development the nickname ‘Terminated’. Nevertheless, the property developers and pet politicians insisted that the area would be designed for London’s elite, offering the best accommodation outside of London Wall. The burn-out cars and buses (home to thousands of London’s less elite inhabitants) were bulldozed literally into the Thames, and in 2023 work started on the centre piece; a botanical garden of radiation tolerant succulents, surrounding a Sistine Chapel style opera house.

By 2024, twenty-five of the planned four hundred houses had been built, and just three sold. All three were bought by the SNP to provide lodging for minor dignitaries whenever they made their rare excursions from Edinburgh to civil war torn England. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your birthright, 2024 coincided with the Americo-Ecosse Treaty, and Britain effectively became a no-mans land between the United States and Euro-China. The opera house survives today like a red poppy in the Somme.

The Stratford Universal Opera Palace (euphemistically and somewhat dyslexically known as The Soup Kitchen) stands slap-bang in the middle of the concrete cap. The dirt-streaked rose-rendered walls climb from scrub undergrowth, up four stories, to a circular gallery of one-way glass (the wrong way). From one quadrant, an arched formation with barrel-vaulted roof marches forty metres through the weeds and blackened car shells - home to a new army of the dispossessed and radiation sick - south towards the Thames. Inside, the arched main hall is marbled and gilded in anachronistic black and gold. The major of three segmentations boasts the theatre itself, leaving the lobby and lounge nearest the main entrance. From the lobby, two sweeping flights of stairs lead down to the – quaintly - sexually denominated atriums-cum-toilets.

Taking two steps at a time, I emerged from the male staircase and paused beneath the black arches and looked around as if disoriented; just another punter late back from the interval. The usher waited by the over-sized wooden doors to the main chamber.

It would have been ten good strides to where the usher stood to one side, arm straightened onto the over-ornate plated handle of one of the pair of doors to the theatre. By stride five I managed to extract several simultaneous pieces of information. One, the door (complete with usher’s separated arm) was rushing towards me. Second, that I could apparently fly backwards in a fractionally delayed response to the door’s approach. And thirdly, that a bomb had exploded behind those doors.

I lay where I fell in the dark. Behind a blanket inner-ear buzz, I could detect the tremble of alarms, and the unmistakable bellowing and screaming of life flooding away. People dying in a black, blinding pain. If I could have seen them, I knew that their facial expressions would be those of disbelief and shame. Shame that they lacked legs, or arms, and that they sat in their own shit and blood, some unhurriedly trying to push metres of guts back inside their ripped bodies.

Lying motionless, I waited patiently for my vision to improve. By the time I could see enough to create hazy structure from the surrounding walls and ceilings, I realised that even had my head not been ringing so hard that my eyes were half-blinded, a thick mulch of dust and smoke allied with darkness concealed most detail. I eased myself to my feet, gingerly checking each limb and joint for damage. My onboard GG already indicated only cuts and bruises, but if an EM pulse was involved they couldn’t be trusted. I could remember during my first tour of the Congo watching my oppo climb to his feet before he realised that he only had one. His Medis had indicated little or no damage following the triggering of an antipersonnel mine and integrated EM pulse, and adrenaline allowed him to stumble on one good foot and a stump for twenty metres before the unmedicated shock hit him and he fell dead, face-first onto the soft earth.

This time my physical and virtual reports concurred. Even my fingers seemed intact, although the garrotte had disappeared. Oddly, this failure irked, despite the circumstances. Back in the Congo, I would (I was sure) have bounced immediately to my feet, in fighting stance with the garrotte ready. I was getting older. Weaker, slower.

Perhaps that was why the bitch had deserted me?

As the dust and the bodies settled, I could make out the remains of the doorway to the main chamber. I sidestepped still-blazing body parts - slipping as I did on wet pools of blood - and skidded to a stop just inside. By now, the walking wounded were stumbling scorched and blackened towards me. An unhurried, confused trickle of lucky ones. Judging by their number, the majority of the sell-out three hundred audience were redistributed into several thousands of pieces throughout the domed space. Looking up through the smoke and dust, the ceiling paintwork was a patchwork of black carbon and Aboriginal-style tracers of blood.

My eyes scanned down and across the carnage. The chamber had been designed with a two-layered terrace of seating, arced around the stage. The centre of the lower terrace, where my seat had been, was now reduced to a dark void, fenced by illogically balanced structures of seating, floor panels, and human flesh. At first sight, it had the shape of a giant spider’s web, bodies writhing in futile attempts to escape the maw that must eventually emerge from the dark central funnel. I looked away, to the upper tier. Pushing through the unresisting survivors, I ran up the side staircase and stopped at my best guess for her row.

I saw her. About ten seats across in the row above me. My legs stiffened as I forced them forward, and my guts loosened. She sat upright, stone still. Her eyes were open, but as I approached she didn’t flinch, couldn’t (I realised never would), react. A two-inch thick stake of splintered balustrade emerged Alien-like from her abdomen, and presumably continued through the seat back, impaling her. Blood soaked her dress, and pooled in her lap like a miscarriage.

She was still beautiful. Chalk cheekbones, and rouged lips. Dark, normally jet-black, but now dust-grey streaked rivulets of hair to her shoulders. Her eyes, once the green of an ocean storm, were now glazed. The dead green of glacial ice.

My knees buckled as my stomach retched, and I fell in front of her, grabbing her dead hand in both of mine. I fought to push the marriage of fear and hot anguish back down. Black fury, their bastard child, greyed my sight and I could feel the familiar runaway surge of brutality knotting my emotions into one peak of clarity.

I stood and punched her in the face as forcefully as I could. That haughty nose disintegrated into fragments of bone, cartilage and blood, splattering my face and clothes. Her head recoiled, neck broken, and hung over the seat back leaving those green eyes staring blankly at the dome overhead, finally oily and dull.

Cradling my stinging knuckles, I turned to the neighbouring place, but there were no body parts, blood, or damage to his seat. For a few horrible seconds my conscience tried to suggest that I was mistaken; that nobody had sat next to her. But the memory of his arm curled around hers was etched into my mind's-eye. The same picture was repeated and scrambled by my cruel imagination into images of their naked bodies entwined, and their shared smiles and light kisses as they explored one another. I searched the adjoining rows and then the entire tier. Nothing. He was gone.






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