Jam Read online

  “H-E-P-L,” I read aloud.

  “I got confused, all right? The sun was out. They’ll get the idea. More than what you lot did.” He glanced up. “Where’s he going?”

  I turned just in time to see Tim disappearing over the low wall that marked the edge of the terrace. I bolted over and saw him marching determinedly across the roof of Bar 66 like a homeowner on his way to complain at the neighbors.

  “Shit,” I said. I kicked a leg over the wall, did something distressing to my testicles, readjusted, and lowered myself gently onto the sticky black gravel below.

  “Fine! Meeting over! Get the hell out!” called Don, as Angela fed herself after me. “And take your bloody breakfast cereal!” My spider box landed nearby. The occupant turned some impressive gymnastics and escaped harm. I picked her up and lightly patted the lid in a vaguely comforting gesture before holding her out at arm’s length again.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” called Angela, after she, too, dropped onto the gravel. “We’re just going to look at the message and come right back.”

  “I don’t know why you’re still talking to me when I said very clearly that the meeting’s over,” sniffed Don, wrapping his dressing gown tightly around himself.

  Bar 66 was—had been was probably more accurate, I corrected myself sadly—a slightly misguided attempt to create the atmosphere of a traditional English pub in a nightclub setting, somewhat themed around the Battle of Hastings. It was also on the corner of the block, so any further progress was impeded by the yawning, jammy abyss of McLachlan Street. This was clearly bothering Tim as he stood at the edge of the roof with his foot on the fiberglass arrow that protruded from the eye of neon King Harold.

  “Still can’t read it,” said Angela, filming towards Hibatsu. “Need to get across the road, I think.”

  Tim started pacing antsily again. “What’s the world long-jump record?”

  I pointed. “As far as that parking meter, I think.” He seemed disheartened. “The triple-jump record might be far enough.”

  “Doesn’t really help, Trav.”

  “Next roof’s lower down,” said Angela, energized by the expedition. “Maybe there’s a way we could . . . make a glider?”

  Tim considered this. “We’d need the right materials. I think number 16 has a wetsuit . . . Oh, hang about.” He was looking up thoughtfully. I did likewise, and noticed the telegraph wire running from a nearby pole to the edge of the roof of the convenience store across the way. Tim pulled his belt out of his trouser loops with a single sharp snap of leather.

  “This might be a bad idea,” I said, as he stepped onto Harold’s arrow and threw the belt over the line.

  “This is a good idea,” he said, through clenched teeth. He wrapped the belt around his fists. “It’s a great idea. I’m adapting. I’m doing what has to be done to survive. I have no fear. None.”

  He jumped.

  “OH JESUS MONSTER TRUCK DRIVING CHRIST THIS WAS A TERRIBLE IDEAAAAAAAAAAA,” he yelled as the belt screamed its way along the thick cable, tossing his legs around like a mishandled puppet before his final vowel was suddenly cut off as his body slammed heavily into part of the corner shop’s upper wall, which happened to contain a window.

  As the echoes of the shattering glass gradually tinkled away, Angela and I stood wordlessly exchanging concerned looks for some time before a hatch was thrown open on the shop roof and Tim hauled himself up, exhaustedly waving his arms to get our attention. His hands were severely reddened, from friction burns and blood.

  “Are you all right?” I called.

  “Can you see the building?” asked Angela.

  Tim nodded to answer both questions, then shielded his eyes to peer into the distance. “No good,” he said. “Writing’s too small. Angela, can you toss your camera over?”

  Angela examined her camcorder unhappily, as if contemplating handing her sick hamster to the tactless vet with the big syringe. Then she stared at a section of the jam that was sucking noisily on the windscreen wiper of an abandoned white-topped Mini. She turned to me. “What’s the world camera-throwing record?”

  “Not far enough. Also there isn’t one.”

  “Oh well.” She heaved a deep breath. “Guess it’s my go, then.” She climbed up onto the arrow and started taking off her belt.

  “I don’t think this idea has gotten any better,” I said, tugging gently at her trouser leg.

  “Look, it’ll be easier now; the window’s broken. And Tim’s heavier than me.” She tightened her grip, breathed in, and hopped off before I could come up with a reason for her to stop.

  One came to mind a moment later. While Angela was almost certainly lighter than Tim—even if Tim became steadily more emaciated with each day he wasn’t living with his mum—Tim had been able to distribute that weight, because Tim hadn’t been trying to zipline down while filming with one hand.

  She almost made it halfway across before she let go. Either the belt slipped from her grasp or she couldn’t outlast the pain from the strap tightening around her knuckles. I didn’t get a good look because my hands reflexively slapped over my eyes the moment I saw her detach from the wire.

  “Ow,” I heard her say. Which seemed like an understated response to being stripped down to the marrow, so I let one of my hands slide down my face.

  Angela had landed on top of some kind of delivery van that was part of the modest traffic queue that had been forming at the fateful moment of jam strike. She got to her hands and knees and returned her gaze to her camera’s viewfinder. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” she said, less for our benefit than for that of the tape. “Luckily, my fall was broken by . . .” she knelt by the edge of the van and filmed the logo on the side. “Bumby Graham’s Bakery. And if that’s not good advertising, I don’t know what is.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked, before deciding it was a fatuous question. “Do you see a way back up?”

  “Hey, there’s a sunroof here,” she said, kneeling by a black square in what she was using as a floor. “Do you want me to take a look inside? If the bread’s still good we could add it to the supplies.”

  “Pragmatism!” cheered Tim from the opposite roof. “Very important quality! Let’s do it!”

  “Um,” I said worriedly, unheard.

  She shoved her elbow through the cheap plastic until a large enough gap was formed, then placed her hands either side of the hole and shoved her face in for a look. A moment’s utter stillness passed, then she scooted backwards on her arse, her eyeballs now doubled in size.

  The back doors of the van were ajar. The interior was flooded with jam. And Angela sticking her face down the sunroof had been like holding a biscuit above a dog’s nose. The jam surged upwards in a squarish column and started spreading out across the van’s roof as if it were a thick slice of farmhouse multigrain. She backed right up to the edge of the roof and the jam below her in the street slurped in anticipation.

  “There’s no bread!” she cried, somewhat hysterically. The ever-growing puddle of crimson was dripping unpleasantly off three of the truck’s edges and wasn’t hesitating to get the fourth under its belt.

  “JUMP!” suggested Tim loudly.

  Angela opted to act before thinking and threw herself back towards Bar 66. This time I was a little more prepared, and only one of my hands slammed over my face. Through my third and fourth fingers I saw Angela’s limbs wrap tightly around the upper portion of a lamppost that protruded from the redness like a buoy. She shuffled around to film the jam as it claimed the van completely.

  “Travis!” called Tim. “Can you reach her?”

  “What? Oh. Hang on.” She couldn’t have been more than six feet away from the King Harold sign. I gripped the protruding arrow, placed my feet on his steel shoulders, and leant as far back as I could. Harold’s flailing right arm squealed with displeasure and shifted slightly, and the sudden movement sent hot ripples of fear through my limbs.

  Angela was stretching her free hand towards me, her camera ar
m hooked around the pole to capture my petrified face. There was still a foot of clearance. Below us, the jam made a sort of yawning sound.

  Suddenly I noticed a television aerial sticking out of a nearby section of Bar 66’s roof. In my mind’s ear I heard the word adapting in Tim’s voice, and a momentary thrill went through me as my very own bit of survival improv came to mind.

  I leaned forward again, grabbed the end of the aerial, and yanked once, twice, three times before it snapped off its housing. A few components that some technician long ago had probably worked quite hard to install drizzled down and disappeared into the jam with a sound like the soft patter of raindrops on a car roof.

  This time, Angela’s hand closed around the metal rod. We hung there silently for a few moments, taking comfort in our firm connection, like God and Adam in that one painting. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to let go of the lamppost, now. Ready?”

  “Yes. I mean no. Wait!”

  “What?”

  “Could you . . . hold onto it with both hands this time, please?”

  She tutted as if I’d asked her to stop her dog from weeing on my lawn. With some complex twitching of limb and shifting of weight she managed to get the camcorder strap to slide up her arm so she could wear it like an elbow pad, and put both her hands around the aerial. “Okay, here I go.” And there she went.

  I wasn’t prepared. Her weight almost tore the aerial out of my hand, my hand off my arm, and my arm off my shoulder, in that order. I grimaced as the pain tightened about my fingers. Angela was kicking her legs, trying to find a foothold on Bar 66’s gaudy logo, and every movement sent another shock wave through my straining arm. The thought of actually trying to pull her up was almost comical.

  “Oh my god! Pull me up!” she cried.

  “Ha, ha, ha.”

  “What?!”

  “Nothing! Is there anything you can put your weight on?”

  She waved her feet towards the building and I felt something click in my arm bones. “Hang on,” she said, needlessly. “Yes. Yes! I think if I swing forward I can put my feet on the—”

  A loud, metallic CLONK rang out, and I felt myself shift an inch away from the building. Something that sounded important rattled out from behind King Harold and succumbed to the jam.

  “—sign,” completed Angela, in a heartbreakingly small voice.

  The arrow to which my arm was clinging had almost bent into a complete right angle. The flimsy sheet metal was just rated to support a few neon tubes, not two adults hanging from its top half. It was groaning like a wounded rhino.

  I shut my eyes and counted the ways I could possibly survive this situation. One. The sign flips in midair and lands between us and the jam, acting as a raft for just long enough to let us jump onto some other, more permanent platform. Two. An enormous superdense object spontaneously materializes next to the planet Earth and gravity shifts ninety degrees.

  I came up with three more and was working on a fourth when I realized that the sign wasn’t falling. I tentatively opened one eye, then a second.

  “You people,” hissed Don through gritted teeth, kneeling on the roof of Bar 66 and pulling the sign back with both hands. “If you people were any stupider, you could use the tops of your heads to catch rainwater.”

  —

  “You saved us, ” said Angela, once the three of us were safely back on the roof of the bar.

  “Look, don’t make a big thing of this,” said Don contemptuously. “Don’t think I’m starting to like any of you dipshits. I was just watching you all being complete failures from my roof and, well, you know when you’re watching your grandma trying to type, and she’s so crap and taking so long that you just want to slap her hands away and do it for her?” He slapped Angela’s camcorder away from his face to illustrate the point.

  “Don?” said Angela wearily, nursing the hit.

  “What.”

  “Thank you very much for saving us.”

  He folded his arms and sneered. “You’re welcome,” he said, spitting the words from the corners of his mouth. Then his gaze shifted to the middle distance. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Tim was still on the roof of the convenience store opposite, standing stock still. His head was tilted back to watch the sky, and he had one hand held to his lips. He seemed to be contemplating something extremely important but hadn’t quite made up his mind as to which emotion he was going to respond with.

  And now that Don had stopped talking, I could hear it. A tiny, rhythmic thump coming through the thick quilt of silence. Helicopter rotors.

  I followed my ears, and saw it. A gray-green dot in the sky to the east, following the river and getting closer and louder by the second.

  Unlike Tim, Don had absolutely no uncertainty as to how to react. He immediately ran forward, jumped on top of a ventilation shaft, and began waving his arms like he was giving a semaphore message that had been generated by randomly smashing a keyboard. “HEY!” he yelled, his voice echoing hugely through the dead city. “DOWN HERE!”

  “Don’t bother!” called Tim from the opposite roof, who was probably feeling left out. “It won’t see us from that far!”

  “OH, EAT A GIANT DICK! HEEEEY!” He hastily pulled off his dressing gown—revealing austere black boxer shorts and a threadbare T-shirt for something called Mogworld—and began twirling it frantically around his head. “SURVIVORS! CHARITABLE ACTS! PUBLICITY! THINK OF THE HEADLINES!”

  “Holy shit, it’s coming towards us,” said Angela, zooming in as the helicopter appeared to rotate and the rotor noise grew in volume.

  “Yes. YES!” roared Don. He waved his dressing gown with renewed gusto. “I told you there’d be a rescue operation! A whole city can’t get jam packed without someone noticing!”

  “Hey!” yelled Tim. “Is that thing heading for us?”

  “Yes!” shouted Don. The noise from the helicopter was getting loud enough to drown our voices. “GET BACK OVER HERE! YOU IDIOT!”

  “SHOULDN’T IT BE SLOWING DOWN?”

  Not only was the approaching helicopter not slowing down, but it seemed to be having trouble keeping a straight course. It weaved and bobbed drunkenly back and forth like a fly sizing up the biggest horse carcass it had ever seen. Don gradually ceased flailing and let his gown dangle forlornly from his hand.

  I was able to get a very good look because it descended to eye level, narrowly missed ploughing straight into Bar 66, turned awkwardly, and found a spot to hover just in front of Don’s roof terrace, pitching and yawing like a set of wind chimes in a breeze. The helicopter was a very large military gunship generously equipped with missiles. The hull was patterned with green camo and the occasional American flag. It was going to try to land, which would have been a tall order for a skilled pilot, let alone whatever drunkard or cretin was in charge of it.

  The gunship tilted down too hard and thrust itself forward too fast. Its nose screamed along the terrace floor, tearing up tiles and patio furniture as it went, before the spinning blades ploughed effortlessly through the roof and upper story of Don’s apartment like a circular saw through a wedding cake. Pieces of furniture and infrastructure fountained up out of the chaos like the contents of a woodchipper. I glanced at Don. His mouth was agape.

  The engine finally stalled and the tail of the helicopter collapsed down onto the terrace, crushing the picnic table. The rotors continued mincing the building’s interior for a few seconds before slowing and stopping, whereupon what remained of the ruined roof collapsed and buried any possible entrance to the apartment.

  As the noise gradually faded away I became aware of

  the sound coming out of Don’s open-hanging mouth. “—uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.”

  The ensuing thoughtful silence was interrupted by a metallic thud, then another, then a twisted, vaguely door-shaped piece of metal detached itself from the wreck and bounced away. A human figure, dressed in black, pushed itself exhaustedly out, landing quite heavily amid the debris on the floor bel
ow.

  As the figure struggled to its knees and crawled towards the edge of the roof, I saw that it was a woman, wearing slightly skewiff business attire, a pair of headphones, and mirrored aviator sunglasses with one missing lens. She was filthy, and her hair had almost completely come out of its ponytail.

  “Excuse me,” she said in an American accent, tottering slightly as she approached us. “Would you by any chance know if anyone’s organizing a rescue operation?”

  Then she fainted.

  DAY 2.2

  —

  We found another survivor in the wreckage. Or rather, I found another survivor in the wreckage. A round of paper-scissors-stone decided that I would be the one to check the gunship for supplies and unexploded fuel. I squeezed my way through the twisted hatchway into the rear compartment and saw him lying unconscious in the cockpit, half in and half out of one of the control seats.

  He was a soldier: a well-built man with a crewcut, dressed in urban camo and some kind of armored vest covered in pouches. I grabbed him under the armpits and pulled. It was like dragging a sofa across a thick-pile carpet, but I managed to shift his massive form over to the hatch and push him out with my feet.

  “That’s all,” I said, crawling out after him into the waning daylight. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything we can . . . What are you doing?”

  Don paused in the act of fiddling with the unconscious soldier’s belt and stood, turning his nose up with insulted dignity. “I am taking his trousers.”

  “That’s a bit cheeky, isn’t it?” said Angela, who was tending to the female survivor by uncertainly dabbing her forehead with a bit of dry cloth and trying to force bottled water into her mouth.

  “Oh, it’s very easy to occupy the moral high ground when you’ve got trousers of your own, isn’t it?” said Don, worrying the soldier’s boots into his trouser legs. He waved a temporarily free hand at the crumpled gunship and pile of impassable debris that now utterly clogged our only way back inside Don’s apartment. “Some of us lost access to all our trousers when American military ordnance smashed through their homes. And are starting to feel the cold up here. This is just the start of the reparations, I promise you that.”