Chapter 67: Give Unto Others

Odile

2110

The remuneration for a day's work was meagre. It amounted to nothing more than the use of a second-hand blanket and a meal that was double the size of what Odile normally had to eat. That was all. But it was something.

Edith was helping to boil a pot of stew on a stove, while Odile doled it out into wooden bowls that were greedily snatched from her by desperate supplicants in the long queue that stretched ahead of her. This queue had started to form well before dawn and many of the hungry and needy had been waiting for hours.

"How's it going?" asked Roland cheerfully. He was the old man who'd organised the soup kitchen in Lancaster after thugs had burnt down a similar enterprise in London. This was an inferno in which dozens of helpless patients were incinerated. As Roland frequently reminded Odile and the others who occasionally worked for him, things might be bad in Lancaster but they were much worse in London. Odile wondered whether Roland was just saying that to comfort people who usually saw a capital city on television that still had expensive shops, art galleries and public monuments. Was it really so bad in England's distant far south? Odile wasn't sure. She'd never even been as far south as Manchester.

There was a television pinned to the soup kitchen wall tuned to a news channel despite the many complaints from those queuing. They'd rather watch a quiz show or a situation comedy that showed a life of indescribable luxury led by middle-class families affluent enough to live in a gated community. What made matters worse was that Roland insisted on screening news from the EBC which was a television company that currently attracted only a small percentage of the national audience. And this was for good reason. The EBC News had few of the exciting graphics and pulsating music that enlivened the news on Sky England. There were too many depressing news items about famine and drought, often happening in countries no one had ever heard of, and not enough about celebrities and television talent shows. Indeed, at the same time as Odile was ladling out soup, the newscaster was droning on about the recent conflict in Virginia between England's ally, the Republic of North America, and their mutual enemy, the rump USA known officially as the Northern Unites States.

"Do you think it'll be the big one?" asked a man with as good as no teeth at all and an overcoat that consisted of more threadbare patches than any of its original mohair.

"The big one?" wondered Odile.

"You know: when the bombs go up and we all die," he said.

"That'll never happen," said Roland cheerfully as he hovered behind Odile. "No one could be so stupid as to bring the whole of human civilisation to an end. It's taken us tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years to get here. Who'd want to wipe it all out in a single day of utter madness?"

"That's what they said about Israel," said an elderly woman who'd already got her soup and was dipping a large chunk of freshly baked bread into it. "Look what happened to Jerusalem. Not to mention Damascus and Bethlehem. It's still glowing from radiation after nearly forty years. And I bet that's what they said in India, Kyrgyzstan and the Ukraine before that."

"It's different this time," said another man who was standing several people behind in the queue. "The Americans have got more missiles than the rest of the world put together. It's the one thing the yanks were good at building. Now they're pointing them at each other instead of at the Russkies or the Chinese or the Iranians."

"Let's hope some of them are pointed at the fucking Scots," said another man in the queue. "I don't trust the Scots not to start another bloody war. They're always sneaking people into England, but they don't let any immigrant scum out."

"Let's not get into an argument," said Roland hastily, who knew only too well how much more impassioned the discussion could get. "We all know that the Scots wouldn't want to bomb England however much our government antagonises them. Radiation clouds can blow north as much as they can south."

"Well, I'm glad we kept our fucking nukes," the last man said. "Perhaps if we'd used them already, the Scots and the Irish and the rest wouldn't keep humiliating us."

"We've got a wider choice on the menu," said Roland raising his voice over the conversation. "We've got two soups now. There's Leek and Potato Soup. And there's Vegetable."

"No meat though," said someone in the queue. "I ain't had no meat for ages."

"There's no real meat anywhere anyway anymore," said another. "It's all GM crap. When's the last time anyone here could ever afford real meat?"

Odile wasn't sure. But each discontented voice quietened down after she'd ladled out the soup and the supplicant shuffled to one side to gulp it down under the canvas shelter outside the battered old cafe that housed Roland's soup kitchen. All the while above Odile's head the newsreaders gave a litany of yet more depressing news about the world's woes. Was it any wonder that the people queuing up for food would rather watch a cartoon of the ever-popular Rodney Rat or the top-rated show Who Wants to be a Billionaire? where contestants competed with each other to win enough to afford, for instance, a trip of a lifetime to the Scilly Isles.