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  'Really?' Sandra Dee replied, raising an eyebrow.

  Trafford was thrilled at her courage; nobody crossed Princess Lovebud, ever. He had only interjected under the guise of religious fervour. He thought about repeating the gesture and offering up another hallelujah but he did not quite have the courage. Most of the hug circle were staring angrily at Sandra Dee and it was not healthy to emote in an opposite direction to the majority. Once had been acceptably ambiguous but twice would clearly be evidence of disrespect. People who disrespected the mood of a mob hate invariably turned out to be its next victim. All he could do was look at Sandra Dee in what he hoped was a subtly sympathetic manner.

  'It seems to me, Sandra Dee,' Princess Lovebud shouted, 'that the Creator has given you a challenge and that you are not rising to it, girl! He has given you a womb and a cooch that you might be known as a woman and a daughter of Eve and a sister of Diana who loves all babies, but he wasn't so generous in the booby department, was he, girl?'

  'Well, I suppose I shall just have to live with it,' Sandra Dee replied.

  'Yeah! And the rest of us 'ave to live with 'em too, eh! Except of course you don't 'ave to live with 'em, do you, Sandra Dee? You choose to live with 'em and it seems to me that it's time you raised your game, Sandra Dee! It's time for you to become the woman God wants you to be.'

  'I think God wants me to be me,' Sandra Dee replied quietly. 'That's why he made me the way I am.'

  There was an audible gasp at this. Trafford thought that it might have been Kahlua but, whoever it was, they gasped for the whole hug circle. Sandra Dee was in the process of ensuring that her life would be a misery from that moment on.

  'Are you a practising lesbian, Sandra Dee?' Princess Lovebud enquired viciously. 'Do you practise lesbianing?'

  Princess Lovebud was following her usual bullying method of random denunciation. Trafford did not imagine that she had any evidence for such a suggestion; lesbianism was, after all, a serious crime.

  'No,' Sandra Dee replied.

  'Well, in that case get some decent boobies, woman, and stop insulting God and letting down the whole office!'

  Sandra Dee did not reply this time, taking refuge in silence. The mood, which had previously been celebratory, was now tense and highly uncomfortable. Cresta Fiesta, whose welcome gathering it was, clearly felt obliged to say something.

  'You've got lovely hair, Sandra Dee. Hasn't she got lovely hair, everyone?'

  'What a lovely thing to say, Cresta Fiesta, and so like you,' Princess Lovebud announced. 'And now – let's have some cake!'

  Trafford was most surprised that Princess Lovebud was prepared to let the matter drop. Sandra Dee's failure to buckle under the weight of her invective had clearly thrown her. His mother had always told him that the way to deal with bullies was to stand up to them, but since standing up to bullies like Lovebud might easily result in smear campaigns and denunciations to the Inquisition he had never seen the theory put into practice.

  Meanwhile the party cranked up another notch. The large welcome cake was brought out along with boxes of variously iced doughnuts and chocolate-chunk muffins. Sandra Dee, however, simply returned to her desk to resume work. This provoked looks of shock and outrage from Princess Lovebud and her cronies. To refuse to break cake with your crew was posh snob behaviour of the worst kind, but Sandra Dee didn't seem to notice the violent anger that she was provoking. As she passed him, Trafford once more attempted to convey some level of sympathy but she gave no sign of being aware of it, perhaps because he had a mouth full of caramel doughnut at the time.

  10

  When the welcoming celebration finally ended and Trafford had found himself a desk, Cassius strolled over and pulled up a chair beside him.

  'I would so love you to show me a little of what you do on those big screens all day long,' Cassius said cheerfully. 'After all, I may be old but I know that I can still learn and grow and do my best to be a better me.'

  'Way to go!' shouted Princess Lovebud from where she was introducing Cresta Fiesta to the mysteries of the office paintball league. 'Praise the Love!'

  'Praise the Love!' Cassius echoed, putting his hands together as if in prayer and then punching the air.

  Trafford glanced across the room to where Sandra Dee was sitting quietly at her machine; her eyes had flicked towards Cassius as he made his obsequious display of piety. Trafford thought he saw a tiny sneer pass across her normally impassive features.

  After a little while, when Cassius was satisfied that he and Trafford were being ignored, he leaned over Trafford's shoulder and began to click away on his keyboard.

  'Is this how you do it?' he asked innocently, while expertly navigating the computer into the deepest recesses of the NatDat archives. 'Is this where every second of our lives is kept?'

  Cassius steered the search program towards the year 15 BTF.

  '2014 as it was known then. I've chosen it at random,' he murmured. 'Happy with that?'

  Trafford nodded and Cassius pressed the enter key.

  In an instant the figures from almost a century before were crowding the computer screen. Numbers, places, dates, all representing tens of thousands of children who had died before they had ever lived and before Cassius and Trafford had been born.

  'You see?' said Trafford. 'Two months . . . a week . . . a day. If anything these children from Before The Flood died sooner even than kids these days. Most of those that died didn't even make it to their first birthdays. Old science,' he whispered, 'didn't save them.'

  'Apparently not,' agreed Cassius in a loud, assertive voice, before leaning forward once more and applying himself to Trafford's keyboard. 'But what if I do this?'

  Trafford tapped the enter key and in an instant all the figures changed.

  'Do what?' Trafford asked.

  'I have moved the goalposts,' Cassius replied through a mouthful of muffin. 'I have subtracted nine months from all the ages displayed. You will notice that the majority of the figures are now shown as being in the negative.'

  'And your point?'

  'As you can see, those infants who were recorded as dying at four and a half years old are now listed as having died at the age of three and three-quarters. A child who previously was listed as having died at three months now seems to have died at minus six months.'

  'Well, of course, you've just knocked nine months off all the figures,' Trafford said.

  'Exactly. And, as you can see, those children who were listed as having died early in their first year are now represented by negative figures. Look: four months becomes minus five months. One month becomes minus eight. Thousands and thousands of negative figures representing dead children who apparently died before they were born.'

  'Which is clearly ridiculous. You can't die before you're born. What are you trying to show me?' Trafford asked. He was getting annoyed. Cassius had a rather superior schoolmasterly manner about him which would have been irritating even if he had been making any sense.

  'That in fact these children did die before they were born.'

  'I don't understand. All you've done is subtract a figure . . .'

  'Not any figure. Nine months. A woman's term. The mortality figures for the years Before The Flood are not based on the infant's date of birth. They are based on the approximate date of conception.'

  'I still don't—'

  'Don't you see, these figures include abortion and postcoital contraception.'

  'What is post-coital contraception?'

  'It was a pill a woman could take on the morning after sex. It would effectively cause her womb to reject any bonded cells.'

  'You mean chemical abortion?'

  'If you wish.'

  'It's against the law.'

  Trafford had been well enough educated and knew that, in the years BTF, inducing the chemical rejection of a pre-foetal cellular formation had been seen as a different matter to aborting a foetus. The Temple made no such distinction. Abortion was abortion from the first second of conception
and it was murder. The so-called 'morning-after pill' had been a not insignificant factor in causing the Love in his anger to bring forth the flood.

  'All I am pointing out to you, Trafford,' Cassius continued with the same fixed smile on his face, 'is that whoever compiles the infant mortality statistics does so on the assumption that a child's life begins at the very moment of conception.'

  'Which of course it does!' Trafford insisted, looking around nervously.

  'Which it may or it may not, whatever you wish,' Cassius replied. 'But these days the Temple does not allow abortion, nor even post-coital contraception, and therefore current mortality figures are calculated from the date of birth. In order to compare like with like you need to count only the positive numbers on these statistics from Before The Flood, which represent only those babies that died after being born.'

  Once more Cassius's fingers danced across the keys and with a click he removed all the minus numbers from the chart. The screen was suddenly almost empty.

  'As you can see,' he continued, 'the truth is that there was a time when only a tiny, tiny minority of infants failed to reach maturity. In Britain perhaps one in two hundred, not one in two as it is today. This was because of vaccination and that is why I am a Vaccinator. Saving children's lives is my calling and my sworn moral duty. It is, if you like, my faith. I have no doubt that one day I shall pay for my beliefs with my own life but nonetheless I must continue.'

  Cassius gathered up their paper plates and cups.

  'You know, Trafford,' he said quietly, 'there was once a routine vaccination for tetanus. Had your first daughter been born in that ignorant, wicked age Before The Flood, she would have lived to be an adult.'

  11

  Trafford arrived back at his flat to find Chantorria breastfeeding their baby. She was beached upon the couch, naked save for slippers and a tea towel draped across her two-day pubic growth.

  'Hello, darling. Hello, little baby,' Trafford said to his family. 'Hello, Barbieheart,' he added, nodding towards the wallscreen. 'All well in the chat room?'

  'Fine, thank you, Trafford,' the digital image of Barbieheart replied through a mouthful of nachos.

  Trafford leaned forward over the video games table to kiss his wife. The room was tiny and very cluttered and it was something of a struggle to find a way to connect his lips with Chantorria's proffered cheek. Trafford had to support himself as he stretched over the table by placing his hands on Chantorria's curled-up legs.

  'Ow. My veins!'

  'Sorry.'

  The couch was a small two-seater, only very slightly bigger than the flat-pack it had arrived in; nonetheless it ran the entire length of one wall. Despite this, Trafford and Chantorria knew that they were fortunate to have so much space. There were only three of them in the flat, which, with its separate sleeping and living spaces, could legally house six. The real rates of occupancy in most similar dwellings were even more crowded than that. Any number of extended families with as many as ten or twelve members were living in apartments smaller than Trafford's. The wrath of the Love had made London so very, very small. And it was getting smaller all the time.

  'Anybody sharing the joy?' Trafford enquired.

  'Three,' Chantorria replied, giving a rather unenthusiastic wave at the webcam that she had placed precariously on the arm of the couch so that it might cover her feeding her infant.

  Trafford touched the key on his wrist top.

  The faces of the three podcasters who were sharing Chantorria's joy sprang into view on the wallscreen. Two were mothers from elsewhere in the tenement, both naked of course, one breastfeeding like Chantorria while the other, who had recently lost a toddler to whooping cough, was just there to emote. Trafford turned up the volume on his wrist top.

  'I just have to accept that all things are done for a purpose,' the bereaved woman was saying. 'My baby is in a better place, warm and safe in the love of the Love.'

  'Hello, Tinkerbell,' Trafford said in as empathetic a tone as he was capable of. 'You OK?'

  'Coping. Thanks, Trafford. Trying to stay strong,' Tinkerbell replied, dabbing at her eyes with pink kitchen towel. 'I've just been saying how I know that in the end I will be made a better me by this experience, as the Love intends. I've been speaking to him a lot since I lost little Gucci KitKat and he definitely wants me to be stro . . . stron . . .'

  The strength that the Love had wished upon Tinkerbell deserted her. She broke down and wept. Trafford could hear a background chorus of sympathetic voices offering comfort.

  'Babes . . . babes . . . babes.'

  'Be strong, girl. The Lord will protect little KitKat.'

  'The pain passes. It always does in the end.'

  Trafford clicked on the share counter and a figure appeared in the corner of the screen telling him that, including him and Chantorria, there were forty-seven people online sharing in Tinkerbell's pain.

  'Forty-seven friends,' Chantorria said brightly. 'Lovely, Tinkerbell, we're all really getting behind you.'

  Chantorria did not add that this number stood in marked contrast to the mere three people who were sharing her joy, but Trafford knew that this was what she was thinking. He knew that Chantorria felt their lack of popularity keenly. They weren't despised particularly, they were merely not popular, and having only three people wanting to watch her breastfeed made her feel vulnerable. People who were neither popular nor notorious were easy targets for bullying. It hadn't happened yet, not to any significant extent, but if any of the key players in their tenement did take it upon themselves to have a problem with them, they would be defenceless. In such a tight-knit community as theirs, isolation was not healthy.

  This was why Chantorria constantly nagged Trafford to be more solicitous in his attentions to Barbieheart. Barbieheart was the principal eyes and ears of the building, an enormous, globular, housebound sentinel who, although too big to leave her apartment, occupied every room. Barbieheart could be a powerful ally but she could also be a dangerous enemy, and which she became depended entirely on the amount of flattery and face time she was accorded. Despite his best intentions Trafford found it almost impossible to bring himself to give her the respect she considered her due.

  'I've only got three,' Chantorria said with a forced laugh, before adding in a stage whisper, 'and one of them's a perv.'

  The third spectator on the wallscreen, a middle-aged man, pretended not to hear. Like Chantorria, he had a tea towel on his lap.

  Chantorria completed Caitlin Happymeal's feed while Trafford defrosted two lasagnes and chilled a three-litre bottle of Pepsi. They shared their meal over the video game table. Trafford had tried to put a cloth on it to block out the never-ending cycle of adverts for new games that would shortly be available for download. He found it hard to focus on his food among all the leaping, cavorting, fighting, pixilated figures but Chantorria insisted that the game table remain uncovered.

  'We're online, Trafford,' she admonished him. 'Let's try not to look any weirder than we have to.'

  Trafford, knowing the logic, acquiesced. If video games and leaping pixilated figures were fun, then clearly the more of them that a person experienced the more fun they had. What was not to like?

  They ate in silence, silence at least inasmuch as they did not speak to each other. The room was anything but silent, of course. There was a karaoke reality show playing on both laptops and the news was being streamed to the various phones and communitainment devices that lay about the room. There was an ad for a current blockbuster movie running on the back of the Rice Krispies box and of course the local community on the wallscreen were all emoting. On top of this, the noise from all the other laptops, communications devices and cereal boxes in the tenement could be heard through the plasterboard walls of the apartment.

  The heat was oppressive, as it always was. Trafford watched the sweat beading on Chantorria's upper lip as she ate. It ran in rivulets down between her breasts. The baby began to scream, testy in the heat as they all were.

>   'You two are quiet,' the voice of Barbieheart barked. 'Join in, why don't you?'

  Chantorria jumped like a startled bird and instantly turned up the volume on Tinkerbell's face on the screen.

  'I just feel lost and totally sick and numb,' Tinkerbell said as her voice rose above the semi-muted babble. There was such pain etched across her youthful countenance, sufficient pain even to carve lines of anguish across the rock-smooth solidity of her heavily Botoxed brow. 'Like a piece of me has been cut out. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't know God was there for me.'

  'I'm here for you too!' Chantorria blurted and Trafford winced at the obvious neediness of her tone. Did she not understand that bullies feasted on weakness? If Chantorria did not wish to be treated as a victim then she should not advertise herself as a victim waiting to happen.

  For a moment Trafford found his thoughts flitting to Sandra Dee, the natural-breasted young woman whom Princess Lovebud had tried to bully at the office. She was not a victim. She had returned Princess Lovebud's stare and in that small act of defiance she had effectively defended herself. Trafford had noticed this phenomenon before. The mob could be confused by displays of individual courage. But it was very hard to be brave.

  'Thanks, Chantorria, that's really, really awesome,' said Tinkerbell through her tears. For a moment Chantorria smiled but then Tinkerbell added nastily, 'Although I'm not sure a young mum with a healthy baby to put on her booby is exactly who I need to be there for me right now.'

  Chantorria recoiled as if she had been slapped. She reddened deeply. Trafford watched as not only her face but her shoulders, arms and whole chest throbbed with blotchy mortification, her nipples almost disappearing as her skin around them burned with the colour of fear and embarrassment.

  'I didn't mean . . .' Chantorria stammered.

  But Tinkerbell had moved on; she had so much that she needed to say. It was her grief, after all.

  'One good thing is my psychic,' she was saying. 'You know, Honeymilk? She's been channelling my little boy since he left me and he's told her he's happy where he's gone. Honeymilk is sure of that, he's happy and he's waiting for me with his big sister who went before.'