Driftwork

The radio went off. She turned away from the sink and pushed a few buttons with her soap sudded hands to try and get the Erik Satie back. It didn’t. She scowled at the dead radio and dried her hands assuming that the either the fuses had blown or that there was a power cut. She tried the lights. And noticed that the fridge-freezer had stopped its eternal huuuuummmm. She was about to go down in the celler when in a heart stopping moment of intuition she looked out of the kitchen window, to see Sophie run across the lawn and stop dead with an expression between flicking between shock terror and amazement.
She ran outside.

“What is….” She never finished the sentence and never knew what she would have said next.

The M25 was silent for the first time in fifteen years. Her daughter looked up at her. They walked down the street. At the end of which they could look down towards the stalled motorway. Her ears hurt in the silence. On the bridge three men were standing talking quietly as they looked down on the road below. Others milled about, reluctant to leave their cars, their gardens, their places of work.

“Waht happened ?” Somebody, perhaps it was her, asked.

One of the men inhaled deeply on the smoke and said. “Electro magnetic pulse. I think. Nice.”

Sophie threw a stone a dead car.

The man said “hey…” stopped and then laughed. “That I guess is the end of that Krondratieff wave. It’s nice here.” Looking around.

“Especially today.” She said leaning over the parapet and looking down on the motorway watching people deciding to leave their cars…

The boy-microcomputer assemblage was resting on the squares raised bed garden wall, Macdonald and shake standing beside him on the wall, computer trilling and beeping as he played focused on the small grey system before him. The sun warming his multicoloured sun creamed face, the coloured stripes making him look more like a metropolitan indian than he was. Occasionally he’d pause the machine and emerge from the assemblage to take a swig of the cooling fast food, looking around the square as he did.

During one such pause the machine crashed, stopped, the screen fading to the uniform grey of the plastic case. He cursed the lost game and hit the solar power units a few times in a vain attempt to make it work. When he realised it wasn’t going to reset itself, looked around the square blinking owlishly a few times as he faced the external world for the first time in ages. He took a last swig of milkshake and wandered off to see what was happening.

In the alleyway to the main street an ashen faced man was sliding down the wall. He looked up, shocked, dying and wheezing. “It’s all right, my pace maker has stopped…” He stopped before the boy-assemblage could say anything.

The car engine stopped. I waited tensely for the expected crash, five, six or three minutes. I don’t know. I sat there until I was sure everyone had stopped. Surprised that nobody ran into me.

“Weird” I muttered to myself. My hippy youth returning to me in a flash, as it did in moments of high stress. I put my baseball cap on, the one with the Mayakovsky badge (they’d run out of the Brecht ) and got out of the car. Others were getting out of their vehicles equally tentatively. Not people were speaking, they looked rather dazed.
All the electrics were dead.

On the bridge above me a couple of guys were looking down onto the road. Their faces shifting from surprise to amusement.

There seemed no point staying with the car so I shoved the stuff that I wanted into my shoulder strapped brief case and left the road, clambering up the embankment towards the bridge. In the gradually growing noise of people beginning to speak an old tractor chugged reassuringly across the bridge.

One of the men on the bridge took my bag as I clambered over the bridge parapet. I asked them where we were.

He shrugged “This was the E303, but I guess its really the steppe since that idiot America set off the big one…”

The last TV programme was a ten year old repeat of Treasure Hunt. A million bored viewers watched the helicopter shrink into a while hole.

He wrote in dark blue letters on an aluminion quert keyboard, with the letters appearing on the opal white 21 inch screen `C.G.Jung fergreift sich an Picasso` and then frowned at the screen as it died, the white screen fading into a small brilliant white dot, and then disapeared. The familiar led lights on the front of the computer had dissapeared. The hard disc whined softly as it slowed down and stopped.

“Shit, Sue the system’s gone down again.”
“Have you saved it ?” She asked.
“It just stopped”