Counting Down

The clouds parted, and the yellow ball emerged. Bright and brief, like some lives.

Peggy closed the door on the sunshine and moved to the darker rooms at the back of the house. Begemot stretched, yawned, and lurched towards the litter tray in the kitchen. Peggy's cat stopped short, aware that the litter had not been changed recently. Begemot looked over his shoulder at her as he squeezed carefully through the catflap into the rear-garden.

The bedroom was cold, November had swallowed most of the sun and was gobbing out rain in heavy bursts. It only needed a few days to make these houses cold. Any heating would just make them as damp as a Neanderthal's cave. Peggy looked at the walls of her bedroom, perhaps a mammoth hunt by stick figures would improve them. She lay on the bed, tired at ten past nine in the morning. The telephone rang. The instruction manual said you could set it to ring off after a set number of times. Peggy had tried that, but it hadn't worked. Now she would try to guess the number of rings as soon as the sound began. 42 was the record. Hadn't that been an important number once?

To whom or for why, she couldn't remember.

Six. Six rings. Just as well she hadn't moved from the bed. It had been her worst guess for days, mind you. Out by seven. Practice did make perfect, usually she was plus or minus two. Still, there was always the second part of the game. Who might it have been? Six times: it might have been Vera, her daughter. No, too early in the day, surely? Victor wouldn't phone at all, hadn't before, why would he now? Yes, the time of day came into it, too. The phone had rung 42 times at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon.

That had been God, she'd decided. Or the other one, perhaps.

You could feel important, if you believed you didn't take their calls.

It was hard to make a game of the knocking on the front door or the shouting from the gate. Peggy wondered if they would cut her water off. That would be the last of Begemot if they did. He would be alright: a cat didn't get that fat eating what Peggy remembered to put out for him. Doubtless he knew several kitchens on the urbanisation well.

Peggy knew what people thought. Giving up was a choice too, wasn't it? She looked at the heap of paperbacks on the bedside table. Pastel pink covers and the word journey featuring prominently on them. She'd tried a few. Bad writing about a worse disease. The survivors' books sold better as far as she knew. They'd all been presents from friends. At first she enjoyed reading the terrible prose, sometimes laughing out loud, before that had started to hurt too.

She stared up at the ceiling and counted cracks. There were more every day. Peggy was betting that by the time there were 1001 it would all be over, at last.